Surface Pro 2 vs my Chromebook

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End Task was the term i was looking for :=)

Just comparing....which one does best when it comes to such background processes and which one is good in ending such tasks? In my experience the Mac is best and very easy to find any task and stop that tasks. But how about Windows? (with the hundreds of tasks running in the background that one need to Google and find out, etc.)

This is Windows 8 Task Manager.

This the simple view of the task manager:

It shows all current programs open that you opened. This excludes startup/background processes.

When you open on more detail (it remembers the last view you used, so don't worry you don't need to switch every time if you prefer one view mode), this is the easy to understand task manager.

As you can see, you have the full program name, and separated in 3 sections: Apps, Background processes, and Windows processes.

Performance section, where you see how the system resources are. Click on each item the left side (memory, disk, network), shows more details on them.

Startup section. In my case, I have only 1 startup item, which is my software, and is marked that in the entire list, this is the one that takes the most time to load. As it is the only item, it is always the highest.

 

[badMojo69]

hibernate is terrible!!! it's a relic that never really worked (meaning unreliable).

Maybe for you. I always...always use hibernate and it always works. It's how I save battery. Sleep is just low power and still drinks battery. I could leave my SP2 in my back for more than a week and keep it at 90% + charge.

 

[onlysublime]

Maybe for you. I always...always use hibernate and it always works. It's how I save battery. Sleep is just low power and still drinks battery. I could leave my SP2 in my back for more than a week and keep it at 90% + charge.

but a computer is to be used for work/study/play, not sitting in a bag for a week...

 

[RajeevT]

Is the Surface Pro 2 UEFI-certified/compatible already? And how would i know?

All the Surface models (yes, including the Surface RT/2) have Secure Boot enabled by default which is a UEFI feature. Also it's not too difficult to search the net for "Surface Pro" and "UEFI" and end up with official links like this one.

Going back to the background processes....
I found myself Googling all these unheard-of processes that i come across in the Task Manager and in my opinion is a total waste of time. If i have 100 process does MS expect people to Google each one of them and find out what it is? And if i "accidentally" deleted one program will there be a warning to indicate that deleting such program may harm your computer. Does it still say that?

On a Mac it is just a few clicks away to see whether some program is running or not and you can "Force Close" it. No such thing as a "background process" per se. Very simple and very clear OS i must say.

What a joke! You seem to be new to Windows but also don't seem to know much about your Mac. Just because you don't see background processes listed in the Force Quit Apps menu or displayed in the dock doesn't mean they don't exist. Open up Activity Monitor in OS X and check out the full list if you're interested. Every modern multi-tasking OS has numerous background processes/threads/daemons running at any given point of time, and it's not a normal user's job to bother about them and micro-manage them. Same's the case with Windows too. All you're responsibile for is to not load your system with bloatware and junk that will bog it down. Keep your system clean and don't bother about all the background processes running - most are an integral part of the OS anyway and killing them would make your system unstable.

About hibernate vs. sleep, I don't know how people are claiming that it's faster to restore from the former than the latter. All my systems wake up from sleep almost immediately, whereas hibernate takes longer than a normal boot since it is normal boot followed by restoring the contents of RAM from the hibernate file on disk. Windows 8 has made normal bootup faster though with hybrid boot. Of course, sleep will keep sipping battery power since the system is only in a low-power mode, whereas hibernate means the system is shut down completely.

hibernate is terrible!!! it's a relic that never really worked (meaning unreliable).

That's just not true. Hibernation has worked well for ages now and as I said above Windows 8 even uses it for fast startup/hybrid boot which is enabled by default. It's rock solid and never really fails unless you have bad hardware. It was a bit iffy back when it was newly released in Win9x mainly due to lack of proper ACPI-compliant hardware and FAT-related issues, but ever since the NT-based OSes took over (Win2K onwards but especially with XP) and systems started using NTFS and had ACPI-compliant hardware with proper WDM drivers that supported all the sleep states properly, it has worked faultlessly.

 

[Witness]

Not sure if you already decided, but you'll be happy with the SP2. Hell, get a SP3 which is what I upgraded to.

Boot up is fast, and you really shouldn't be turning it off if you're using it periodically during the day. I almost never turn it off, and charge it at night - the boot up is about 2 seconds to wake it up.

The only advantage of the Chromebook is that it is cheap, and has a good battery life I assume. You're limited in what you can do with it, and having a SP2, you don't really have limitations. You're asking about getting under the hood, and tinkering with background processes but you forget that you can do all that in Windows anyways. The questions are more in the line of "can I do this on a Windows computer" than about the SP2 specifically because at the end of the day it's just like a laptop in a different form factor.

Make the jump. It'll be great.