Windows Task Manager hasn't improved in 30 years—Argus fills in all the gaps for you. The fan suddenly spins up wildly in the middle of the night, and in the morning you want to find out who did it—you open Task Manager, and it only tells you "right now," not "last night." This is the most frustrating part for veteran users. To figure out what's actually wrong with a machine, the standard move is to open three windows: HWiNFO to check voltages and power limits, CrystalDiskIn

📜 Table of Contents

• 01 Don't Rush to Install—You Can Try It Free on the Official Site
• 02 Everything on One Screen: Processes, Hardware, and Ports in a Single Window
• 03 The Readings Stress-Testers and Overclockers Care About Most—Per Core
• 04 Who Did It Last Night—Look Back Up to 7 Days
• 05 Real-World Test: 3 Days 20 Hours, 256 Processes Can't Bring It Down
• A Cold Shower: Don't Rush to Replace the System Entry Just Yet
• Find Your Fit: Who Should Install, Who Should Wait
• Final Thoughts
• Alternative Titles (WeChat)

Windows Task Manager Hasn't Improved in 30 Years—Argus Fills in All the Gaps

Your fans suddenly spin up at midnight, and in the morning you want to find out who did it—you open Task Manager, and it only tells you "now," not "last night."

This is the most frustrating part for veteran users. To figure out what's actually wrong with a machine, the standard move is to open three windows: HWiNFO for voltage and power limits, CrystalDiskInfo for drive SMART data, and Process Explorer for process parent-child relationships. You switch back and forth between three apps, and then you have to line up the numbers yourself.

What about the built-in one? CPU only shows utilization, the drive only shows a single activity percentage, and the GPU only draws overall usage. Whether you've hit the power limit, how long the SSD has been powered on, how much VRAM is dedicated—none of that is there. From Win95 to Win11, this face has barely changed.

Recently an open-source project called Argus popped up on GitHub, folding the work of those three tools into a single window. Written in Rust, open-sourced under AGPL-3.0, 23MB portable package, double-click and run.

I left it running on my 5600X + 4060 Ti machine for 3 days and 20 hours straight—256 processes, nearly 5,000 threads, 120,000 handles—and list scrolling and charts didn't stutter at all.

Bottom line first: it's not a "prettier Task Manager," it's all the readings you'd otherwise need three apps to gather, laid out on one screen. Even better, the official site lets you try the full interface right in your browser—no download needed.

01 Don't Rush to Install—You Can Try It Free on the Official Site

The project shipped its first public release on October 16, iterated to v0.4.0 in a month, and the repo has 303 stars. The tagline on the official site's hero section is pretty honest: "A fast, modern, information-rich Windows task manager."

The first thing worth mentioning is that "Official Site & Online Demo" button: click in, and the Processes, Performance, Services, and Connections tabs are all clickable in the browser, with an interface identical to the local version. To judge whether it suits you, you don't have to install anything into your system first—that's rare among open-source tools.

Once you've decided to install, here are the requirements: Win10 22H2 (19045) or Win11, x64 only, 23.2MB portable build. v0.4.0 just migrated the UI from WebView2 to native Rust rendering, dropping the browser engine entirely; in-app updates come with signature verification, and if GitHub is unreachable it automatically switches to the official mirror—you decide whether to install a new version.

02 Everything on One Screen: Processes, Hardware, and Ports in a Single Window

The Processes page offers three views—by app, process tree, and list—with customizable columns, up to 40. Per-process disk read/write rates, GPU dedicated and shared memory are shown directly as columns—no clicking into properties one by one.

The process tree is what veteran users need most: when a background service spawns a chain of child processes, you can see at a glance who spawned whom and who's doing the dirty work. You can also create rules for priority and efficiency mode, automatically applied every time a given program launches—hand your resource-hungry background regulars over to the rules.

In my screenshot, the top bar has five gauges (CPU / Memory / Disk / Network / GPU) in a row, and the "System Specs" panel on the right lists the 5600X, 32GB DDR4 3200, Kingston 932GB SSD, and RTX 4060 Ti with 15.7GB dedicated VRAM. Previously you'd need GPU-Z + CrystalDiskInfo + Device Manager to put this together.

Services and startup items use the same toggles as the system—you can stop or restart them directly; the Connections page lists TCP/UDP ports by process, with protocol, local address, port, remote port, and state all present—type a process name or 8080 in the search box and it filters precisely.

03 The Readings Stress-Testers and Overclockers Care About Most—Per Core

What really gets DIYers going is the core sensors. After optionally enabling the PawnIO driver, you can read per-core CPU voltage, power, and limit status, AMD SMU data, and fan speeds on supported motherboards. Whether you've hit the power limit and whether voltage is stable—no more opening AIDA64.

On the GPU side, NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel all have wattage readings, each GPU engine gets its own chart, and the charts flow at your screen's refresh rate. In the screenshot, each of the 5600X's 12 threads gets its own cell, with the current frequency labeled on top of each—who's slacking and who's maxed out, all visible at a glance.

The Performance page also conveniently lays out base clock, socket, core count, L1/L2/L3 cache, virtualization status, and uptime—numbers you'd otherwise dig out of CPU-Z and the BIOS are now all in one tab.

04 Who Did It Last Night—Look Back Up to 7 Days

History automatically records the last 7 days; click any moment and the busiest processes at that time are listed directly. Fans spinning up at 3 a.m.? Flip through the charts in the morning and pinpoint the culprit.

The system Task Manager has owed users this feature for decades.

The same "investigate clearly" philosophy carries over to the Connections page: when I took this screenshot, warp-svc was holding port 53, Python had local ports interconnected, and WeChat was connected to 8080—states and PIDs all matched up, and double-clicking a row jumps back to the corresponding process. Troubleshooting port conflicts and seeing who a program is actually talking to is far more comfortable than typing commands.

05 Real-World Test: 3 Days 20 Hours, 256 Processes Can't Bring It Down

With admin rights the refresh interval can go down to once per second. I left it running for 3 days and 20 hours straight—256 processes, 4,899 threads, 127,066 handles—and the charts stayed smooth; with normal privileges you can still see all process paths and usage, and only high-privilege operations require authorizing the privileged service once.

Once it's in the tray, a hotkey brings it up anytime; the refresh intervals for minimized and tray states can be set separately, so it doesn't secretly eat resources in the background. After enabling "Replace system entry," Ctrl+Shift+Esc opens Argus.

A Cold Shower: Don't Rush to Replace the System Entry Just Yet

Code signing is still being applied for, so SmartScreen will show "Unknown publisher" on first run. The project is only a month old—0.3.1 was pulled the same day it shipped, with 0.3.2 taking its place.

So my advice is specific: run the portable build and take a look, but on important machines don't check "Replace system Task Manager" yet. Wait until signing is in place and the version has stabilized for another couple of rounds before letting it take over that hotkey.

Find Your Fit: Who Should Install, Who Should Wait

Try it today (if any apply): - You build, overclock, or stress-test PCs and often watch power limits and per-core frequencies - You frequently check SSD health, power-on hours, and PCIe link status - You've troubleshooted port conflicts or weird cases of background processes spawning chains of children - You simply can't stand switching between three apps

You can wait and see: - You only use the PC for office work and browsing, and Task Manager is just for "End task" - Your main work environment requires fully signed software and compliance - You don't want to touch any monitoring tool that needs a kernel driver (PawnIO is optional—basic features work without it)

Final Thoughts

It's not that Microsoft can't make a good Task Manager—it's that it never intended it for DIYers. What Argus does is, frankly, not complicated: it moves the readings scattered across three or four professional tools back into an interface everyone already knows.

303 stars, four versions in a month—whether it grows into a permanent tool remains to be seen. But at least tonight, if you want to check what your machine was actually busy doing last night, you don't need to install anything—just open the official site and take a look around.

I'm Peng Shu, and I specialize in translating specs into things you can actually use. If you found this useful, feel free to like, wow, and share—see you in the next one.

Data sources: Argus official site (argustask.com) and the GitHub repo's README, CHANGELOG, and Release assets, verified on 2026-11-09; the 3 days 20 hours, 256 processes, 5600X / 4060 Ti and other readings in this article are all from Peng Shu's own on-machine screenshots. The official site badge's "download count" and GitHub's binary asset download stats use different counting methods, so the article does not use download numbers.

Images: 5 on-machine screenshots—official site online demo, Processes page, CPU 12 threads, Connections page, and Performance page overview; the WeChat cover is 封面.jpg (3 alternative covers were not used).

Alternative Titles (WeChat)

1. The hardware data that used to take three apps to see fully now fits in one window
2. Windows Task Manager hasn't improved in 30 years—Argus settles the account for you
3. 23MB, portable, and free to try online: this open-source task manager has something going for it