[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Bakisoft’s Task Manager PPC has been discontinued and the developer has went out of business. In addition, it doesn’t have a trial version and doesn’t seem to support charting.

XCPUScalar 2007 3.00 only displays a (relocatable) current CPU speed and CPU usage meter (in percents) on the taskbar as can be seen in here. It has no history either. This means it can’t be used to debug apps that hide the taskbar (for example, games). Definitely not recommended for this task only.

Finally, sure there are desktop-side tools (for example, Windows Mobile Developer Power Toys) to measure some parameters but most of them (for example, the SOTi Pocket Controller as of version 5.07 build 966 - see this screenshot of its process monitor tool) aren’t able to monitor CPU usage. (Not to mention they all require a desktop computer connected to the Windows Mobile device, which is not only awkward some times, but, in cases, also renders the application to be tested useless – for example, with many hardware 3D enhanced games like Toy Golf (see this for more info on this problem).)

(Note that MemMaid 1.73 only displays the memory consumption of a given app.)

acbTaskMan to the rescue!

This application really excels in finding “rogue” programs because it, unlike its above-mentioned alternatives, is capable of storing a history (even back to the last 24 hours as can be seen in here) of the CPU usage and drawing a chart of it. Furthermore, during drawing the chart, you can not only chart the full CPU usage of all applications, but, in addition, can instruct acbTaskMan to chart a selected one with a different color so that you can easily see how many percent of the full CPU usage has been consumed by the charted application (game).

For example, let’s assume you’d like to know how, say, Opera Mobile, the, in my opinion, best Windows Mobile Web browser behaves. All you need to do is bringing up the context menu of Opera Mobile in acbTaskMan and select Chart CPU. Then, a red graph, in addition to the standard green one, will be displayed; the former shows the CPU usage of the currently charted app (in this case, Opera). In this screenshot, as you can see, Opera consumes about 0% CPU time (look at the red graph) after enabling its charting in abcTaskMan and waiting for some 4 minutes.

Now, let’s start actively using Opera Mobile – with abcTaskMan running in the background and actively monitoring the CPU usage of all apps, including Opera Mobile. Let’s do some active browsing and, after that, return to abcTaskMan to evaluate the results shown for example here.

As can be seen, this application is really-really excellent at charting the CPU usage of applications, particularly when they can’t run in the background (most games), which would otherwise be needed with CPU usage meters not keeping the history.

The CPU usage of abcTaskMan itself

Note that abcTaskMan is also better than the alternatives in that it uses pretty few CPU cycles itself, particularly if you in Display / Update Speed, select Low or X-Low (screenshot here). Then, from the default ~5%, the CPU usage decreases to ~1.7% and ~0.7%, respectively (all figures measured at 624MHz on the x51v). This is definitely lower than the CPU usage of most alternates (see for example the high CPU usage of FdcSoft’s Task Manager!) – except for RegTweak, which needs some 1% at 208 MHz (!).

Also note that, by selecting Display / CPU Chart / Subtract abcTaskMan CPU, you can entirely “hide” the CPU usage of the app itself. That is, the results won’t be at all reflect the fact that the application, abcTaskMan, that has been collecting them, used some CPU time itself.

Problems

What I miss most is the ability to log the CPU usage figures to a file (with, of course, timestamps) for even more thorough or later examination. This would be VERY cool, even with “only” the ability to export these figures of the “charted” app (and not all of them). Nevertheless, this is more of nitpicking: the app is very cool even without this feature.

Otherwise, the app is very stable and during the long-long months and hundreds of apps and games of testing, I’ve never found any app that it couldn’t run with in the background.

Plans for the near future

The developer has just told me he’ll add support for native VGA mode. (Now, it uses pixel doubling in standard VGA mode.)

Links to the above-mentioned alternatives

(Note that the rest of the alternative applications have already been linked in from the article!)

FdcSoft’s Task Manager – one of the best all-in-one system management, registry editor etc. tools. Make sure you check it out – you’ll love it!

TekSoft’s SmartBar - another highly capable all-in-one tools; highly recommended!

Dogfood's RegTweak (also see this); note that the latest beta (2.2.0.0 beta) was released March 16, 2007. It still doesn’t support CPU usage and frequency monitoring; therefore, for the time being, you’ll want to stick with the old, stable, working 2.1.1.0 version.

I also recommend this XDA-Dev thread for more information.