Hi there
I can't make sense of the values the task manager is showing -- for starters I'm running VMWARE workstation rel 12 which is 64 bit not 32 bit so why it's reporting a 32 bit application --no idea. I don't believe the VM is 0% CPU either as there's two servers running on the VM - OK no clients connected but the servers always take a small amount of CPU use.
I also have a quite intensive video capture card running TVpanel.exe- that shows only 17% CPU - but I'm sure it's more as the CPU fan starts running faster etc when that application runs. This hardware is capturing SKY Q program in HD (1080p) video.
Any ideas or are there better REAL programs that display PROPERLY what the computer is doing --I'd like one to be able to run in the background and write to a log say every 10 mins so I can analyse later.
Cheers
jimbo
Download Process Explorer. Link
Here is section of my task manager
Some programs like Norton Full Internet security are written in 32-Bit while 64-Bit is emulating 32-Bit programs
From the Vmware community site: Could this be what you are seeing?
"vmplayer.exe - the GUI - is a 32bit app - the executable that actually runs the VM is vmware-vmx.exe and that is 64bit"
https://communities.vmware.com/thread/272886?tstart=0
Apparently Windows is not able to indicate the correct values for VMWare at all. It's not just CPU usage: Try to determine how much ram it is actually using, only useless and obviously wrong values. And Process Explorer does not really help, it displays the exact same meaningless values as Task Manager.
I am doing some guessing here:
It isn't that Windows and Task Manager are actually lying to you. It is faithfully reporting the information as it is known. Process Explorer reports the same information because it comes from the same source. Unfortunately that information isn't always correct. The memory that VMWare is using was allocated by a device driver. Windows knows about this memory but not who allocated it or for what purpose. There are no established methods where VMWare can tell Windows what it is doing. I believe the CPU usage of VMWare would be reported under one of the system threads but that is just a guess. Without inside information (as would be known by VMWare developers) there is no way of associating a virtual machine with specific threads.
RAMMap, from the same source as Process Explorer, will report the memory used but I don't believe it knows VMWare is behind it.
The VMWare Workstation application is just the front-end GUI, and that is indeed 32 bit, and it's not using much if any CPU because it's not doing much, it's just a shell that displays information.
Each VM has its own process, which you will need to look down in the background-processes to get the info.
