Chapter Summary

In this chapter, you learned about performance monitoring and optimization, portable computer performance, and troubleshooting the system with backup and restore, Safe Mode, and Recovery Console.

Windows XP Professional provides the Performance Console and Task Manager for monitoring, optimizing, and troubleshooting desktop performance. You can use the Performance Console to monitor counters related to performance objects associated with different hardware and software components of the system. Important performance objects that you should be concerned with include memory, processor, and logical and physical disk. You can use Task Manager to provide a quick view of computer performance. Task Manager also enables you to shut down misbehaving applications and processes and start applications at different priority levels. You can also optimize application priority by configuring several settings available from the Advanced tab of the System Properties dialog box.

The Scheduled Tasks application enables you to schedule applications to run at predetermined times. You can schedule applications to run daily, weekly, monthly, at startup, or once only, and you can specify the days and times at which applications will run and the user account under which they will run.

The Control Panel Power Options applet contains several options that are especially useful for optimizing performance and battery power usage on laptop and notebook computers. You can enable standby, which shuts down the monitor, disks, and several other components while saving data to RAM; or hibernation, which saves data to the hard disk and powers down all components of the computer. You can also enable hardware profiles in which you enable or disable hardware components that are used under different conditions, such as connected or not connected to the network.

Windows XP provides enhanced backup and restore tools that help to prevent data loss resulting from hardware failure or other disasters. As well as a normal backup that backs up all specified data, you can perform a differential backup, which backs up all selected files that have changed since the last normal backup; or an incremental backup, which backs up all selected files that have changed since the last incremental or normal backup. A wizard is provided to assist you in specifying options for either backup or restore.

Windows XP provides several options for restarting a computer that is unable to start in the normal fashion. The Last Known Good Configuration starts the computer to the previous configuration that started the computer successfully, and is useful when a problem prevents a user from logging on. Safe mode starts the computer with a minimal set of drivers, and is useful for removing problematic drivers or applications, or rolling the computer back to an earlier state. Using the Recovery Console you can boot the computer to a command prompt and perform various recovery actions. In serious cases, you can use ASR to recover your computer from a system disaster. You can use the Backup program to create an ASR backup that can be used to restore the computer to operational condition.