From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

Monitoring performance

From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

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Monitoring performance

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- [Instructor] Is your PC getting slow? And how would you know? What gauge do you have to measure PC performance? Well, it's a tool aptly called the Performance Monitor. Press the Windows in our keyboard shortcut and type "perfmon" for Performance Monitor. Click "OK". And in the Performance Monitor window choose Performance Monitor under Monitoring Tools. This utility charts resources used by running software. Now only one item is chosen here: % Processor Time, and it's kind of low. But watch what happens when I maximize the window to see what it does. See the little spike? That's because the activity in the computer increased for a short amount of time. To make this tool useful, you must add a few items to the monitor window. So click the green add button right up here. I'll locate the memory category to add a memory item to the monitors list and percent committed bytes and uses, good. I'll click add. And then a couple of other items down in the Network Adapter. Let's do Bytes Received and Bytes Sent. So these items will be added to the graph when I click "OK". And you can see the new line appear just about in the mid point. That's memory usage. And to confirm I'll go down here and uncheck it since both lines are red. And yes that's the percent committed bytes in use. What you want to see with percentage bytes and use is a steady line just like this. If this line were climbing over time without doing anything else in the computer, it could indicate a memory leak, a program that's run a muck. Likewise, the network activity here is pretty much low to non-existent. You can barely see anything for networking the colors at the bottom of the list. They're not showing up. Now something spiked there. I could refer to the color for the item in the list and then check out the activity or just confirm that it's the network that's slowing down the computer or causing a specific program to underperform. Now, while this tool doesn't immediately point to a problem program, malware, or failing hardware it can help set you in the right direction by confirming your suspicions especially for sudden sluggishness or similar issues. Use the Performance Monitor is shown here to see what's really going on inside your PC.

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