Dave Plummer, the creator of the original Task Manager, has created a dashboard for his personal AI project designed to beat the old Atari classic game Tempest. He shared a picture of it on X, saying that this is what the Windows utility would look like now if he were still at Microsoft. You can see it on Tempest AI's dashboard for yourself live, alongside the code for Tempest AI, on Plummer’s GitHub.
This is probably what Task Manager would look like (and sound like) if I were still around. Which is why it's a good thing I knew to stay in my lane, design-wise :-)Live display: https://t.co/E6EOfRoi3MCode: on my github pic.twitter.com/Ke6R2F9y1ZFebruary 16, 2026
The reimagined Task Manager comes with a retro-futuristic aesthetic, complete with RGB flairs, a couple of speedometer-style dial gauges, and a banger soundtrack running in the background. This looks far different from the Task Manager we see on Windows 11 and definitely caters to niche tastes, so we're not sure Microsoft would allow this design aesthetic even if Plummer were still at the company.
Nevertheless, this small exercise is a fun “what-if” for many Windows enthusiasts, which is a nice reprieve amidst all the bugs that have recently been appearing in updates. Users have recently encountered several major issues, including a broken Windows Recovery Environment, unintentional BitLocker activation, and even one that made affected PCs unable to boot.
But despite the cool aesthetics, this isn’t designed to run in the background to display how your Windows PC is performing. When asked about the dashboard’s impact on the processor and memory while it's running, Plummer said that it “burns about 75% of the GPU at 30 fps on my M2 Mac Pro, so it’s ‘not insubstantial’ with its GPU demands!”
Plummer originally built the Windows Task Manager during his free time, but it was so good that it eventually became a part of the of Windows NT. Many of the components of the Task Manager app we’re familiar with today appeared in Windows 2000, and Microsoft has continued to update the program across multiple versions of Windows.
A recent-ish update to the Task Manager was when the company switched RAM speed units from MHz to MT/s in May 2024. Microsoft also revamped the app's design in 2022, which gave it a new look for Windows 11.
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