Summary

This chapter offered an introduction to the world of performance monitoring and benchmarking. Before you can make your computer faster, it is very helpful to know what your computer doesn't perform well with. This chapter showed you how to discover bottlenecks using applications such as the Performance Diagnostic Console, Event Viewer, Task Manager, Windows Performance Rating, and PCMark05. Use the information that you gained in this chapter in the upcoming chapters. For example, if you have a lot of applications that are using a ton of memory, pay close attention to the recommended applications and services to disable in the upcoming chapters.

The next chapter will start to optimize the speed of your computer from the very beginning, the system boot.