After years of complaints about Windows Task Manager displaying CPU utilization incorrectly, a fix is finally on its way

With the latest Windows Release Preview, Microsoft is fixing a problem that has persisted for years: Its Task Manager CPU usage stats didn’t make a lot of sense.

This change was originally announced in the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build at the end of February and has now finally launched onto the Release Preview channel.

Effectively, as this community thread from back in 2020 shows, Task Manager made its CPU calculations based on the base clock of a CPU, as opposed to its effective or ‘real’ clock.

CPUs will go above their base clock for heavier workloads and will do so naturally as you use them. If you are a power user, gamer, or like to overclock, this means that your Task Manager has likely been giving you inaccurate readings for some time. The language in the announcement from Windows is a little fuzzy on the exact details.

“We are changing the way Task Manager calculates CPU utilization for the Processes, Performance, and Users pages. Task Manager will now use the standard metrics to display CPU workload consistently across all pages and aligning with industry standards and third-party tools.”

Notably, this quote doesn’t acknowledge the problem with the old Task Manager or exactly how the new update fixes it. The nod to “industry standards and third-party tools” is a good one, as third-party tools are how one might have caught this problem in the first place.

We have put this to the test to figure out how inaccurate the previous Task Manager was by running 3DMark’s CPU Profile test on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, comparing both CPU usage in Task Manager and HWInfo. In the former program, CPU utilisation hit 100%, whereas the latter did not. The CPU fluctuates around 5 to 5.2 GHz in this test, which is higher than the base 4.7 GHz Windows registers.

Effectively, Task Manager just doesn’t do a very good job at measuring CPU use, and therefore, the ability to quickly ascertain how a game or process loads on the CPU becomes harder.

Any attempt to bring parity to the program alongside competitors can be a good one, and this should make Task Manager better going forward.

If the internal changes in Task Manager are going to be a problem, you will still be able to have it using the previous method—just tick ‘CPU Utility’ in the Details section of Task Manager to use the old CPU process to find your utilisation.

As this is gradually rolling out to users, it’s not guaranteed to arrive with the next public build of Windows 11, but the fact that you can do either CPU measuring process suggests it likely won’t be a controversial change.

Alongside this, with the Windows Release Preview channel, File Explorer is getting accessibility options, RAM, storage, and graphics are now shown at the top of the About page in settings, and Japanese users will now have their name displayed with last name first and first name first, as is customary in the Japanese language.

There are also a handful of fixes, as well as the implementation of the Emoji function on the Taskbar.