Microsoft is revamping Windows 11’s Task Manager so its numbers make more sense

Microsoft devotes most of its time and energy these days to promoting new AI- and Copilot-related features for Windows 11, but the company's Windows Insider builds are still full of small tweaks and changes aimed at improving longstanding Windows features for people who just want to use their PC the way they always have.

New updates that began rolling out to testers in the Windows Insider program yesterday include a couple of small but meaningful changes for Windows power users. First, Microsoft is changing the way the Taskbar works on secondary monitors, allowing users to click it to see the calendar and Notification Center on all monitors, not just the primary display.

Microsoft is also making a change to how the various tabs in the Task Manager measure CPU usage to make it more consistent (and less nonsensical).

In brief, the current Task Manager uses different methods for calculating CPU usage in different tabs. The Processes tab, in particular, used a method for calculating CPU usage that didn't account for the number of CPU cores in a system, allowing processes to report that they were using "100 percent" of your CPU even if they were really only using a single core. The Performance and Users tabs used a different calculation method that did account for the total number of cores in a system. The upshot is that different tabs in the same app could tell you very different things about how much of your CPU was currently tied up by the apps you were running.

The new Task Manager uses "standard metrics to display CPU workload consistently across all pages and aligning with industry standards and third-party tools," calculating CPU usage in the Processes tab the same way it calculates usage in its other tabs.

Microsoft has been testing this change on and off for a few months, starting back in February, but then disabled it "to fix some issues." This week's builds are the first to re-enable the change, suggesting that Microsoft is getting closer to rolling it out to the general public. For people who want to view the old CPU usage numbers in Task Manager for whatever reason, a new disabled-by-default "CPU Utility" column can be added to the Details tab.