Frustrating when you are trying to track an application in Task Manager, the list is constantly shuffling loads of people, and that's why Microsoft developers have added shortcuts to prevent it from happening. Hold down the Ctrl key and everything will freeze in place.

It's so simple — why didn't the developers think of this much earlier?

Shortcuts have been in the Task Manager since 1994. This is because the developer who created the application refused to let anyone on x complain about it.

David W Plummer built a task manager in 1994. Mainly from his lair at home. But word eventually reached out to Dave Cutler, the designer of Windows NT, and let Plummer add code to the main Windows build. As they say, the months of tinkering with the code, various stress tests, and the rest are history.

The core application has changed over the years, but you might be surprised to hear how much it remains the same. Plummer explains the history and tips for using the application in a popular video titled "Inside the Original Author and Task Manager."

The best task manager lore should be the way Microsoft ended up with a "kill all children" feature with a disappointing name in the software — a combination of the "kill process" feature, the original name of today's "exit process" feature, and the newly added recursion feature to replace "process" with "all children". Combination. This was fortunately caught before it ever landed on the shipping version of windows.

Plummer states that the original application is only 100KB in size. Today, it is about 5.2MB. It seems small compared to most modern applications, but it is the file size many times over the original. Plummer says it's perfectly fair given what's been added to the application.

"This is a delicate balance between load time and memory footprint and functionality.

Plummer retired after the release of Windows Server 2003. "The people who worked in task manager did an exemplary job of growing it while maintaining core attributes," he said in the video."