The Best Methods for Monitoring and Modifying System Performance

This section covers the following topics:

  • How to set realistic expectations for the times when you compare the performance of one PC to that of another PC

  • The tools Windows offers to monitor system performance

  • The Windows options provided to modify performance

  • What benchmark tests are and how they can be used (and abused)

Realistic Expectations

Before delving deeper into PC performance, let’s discuss the need for realistic expectations when evaluating your system.

Don’t mix apples and oranges. If you want to compare the performance of your Pentium III 750MHz machine with 128MB of SDRAM memory installed to another PC, don’t evaluate it against an Athlon XP 2.4GHz PC with 256MB of DDR-RAM. Try to compare it to a system of a similar type that is similarly equipped on at least these key points:

  • Similar CPU (same type—for example, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV, AMD Athlon, AMD Duron—if not the same speed in MHz or GHz

  • Similar amount and type of memory

You may run into situations when you want to evaluate your system against a more powerful one to see whether some task would perform faster on the better-equipped PC. But the rest of the time, you’ll want to compare like systems.

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A Cautionary Tale: Getting Up to Speed with Upgrading Computers

“Why isn’t a 2GHz PC 10 times faster at everything than a 200MHz PC?”

Someone asked me that in an e-mail recently, lamenting the fact that she had finally replaced her aging Pentium MMX system with a Pentium IV and didn’t quite understand why everything wasn’t “so much blazingly faster than before.” She ended her note with a plaintive, “Shouldn’t I return my new system as defective?”

Explaining the many reasons why a PC that sounds like it runs 10 or 5 or 2 times as fast would take a whole book of its own. What’s important is that the Pentium IV runs faster, boots faster, loads Windows more quickly, handles types of hardware that an earlier Pentium (Pentium, Pentium MMX, Pentium II, Pentium III) may not, and takes into account many of the ways in which computer use has changed in the past few years.

However, with all the talk of faster speeds and evolving needs, one important fact often gets missed: Many of the ways you use your computers today don’t specifically require a PC with a 2GHz CPU or 512MB of installed memory. Some of your most common activities—creating and editing documents, going online, browsing the Web, playing games, participating in Internet chats and messaging, sending and receiving e-mail, and downloading files—won’t change remarkably whether you’re using a Pentium II-350 MHz or a Pentium IV 1.8 GHz. Mind you, the overall experience of doing these activities may improve slightly. But for most of those tasks, you’d need a faster Internet connection more than a faster processor to get the desired effect.

Should she return her new system as defective? No. From all the information she supplied to me on follow-up e-mails, it sounded like her Pentium IV was running exactly as it should. It was just not running at quite the speed of light she expected.

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Windows Tools

Let’s discuss the tools provided by Windows to help you identify, monitor, and troubleshoot performance problems. You’ll spot some tricks to try to adjust performance, too.

Using Performance and Maintenance under Help and Support

The Help and Support tool available from the Windows Start menu has a Performance and Maintenance section. This section contains suggestions and step-by-step tutorials for optimizing your PC’s efficiency and explains how to do the maintenance necessary to keep your PC in good shape. (Some of this information is discussed later in this chapter in the section “Top Ways to Improve Your Performance.”)

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Figure 12.1: Click a topic to get more information.

Balancing Performance between Foreground and Background Programs

You probably already know that the term foreground programs refer to active, open windows on your desktop. Background programs often run outside your sight (and sometimes without your apparent knowledge) although they may—or may not—appear as icons in your Systray.

An imbalance in the processing time allocated to each type of program (foreground vs. background) can lead to performance problems as Windows struggles to try to handle an imbalanced load.

You can adjust the performance balance as needed (or simply to troubleshoot) by following these steps:

  1. Double-click System in Control Panel.

  2. Choose the Advanced tab and then click Settings listed under Performance.

  3. Select the Advanced tab (again).

  4. Under Processor Scheduling, click either of the following:

    • Programs—if you need to give more processor time to your active Windows running in the foreground

    • Background—if you want to try to equally divide resources between the foreground and background

  5. Click OK.

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Memory Usage Issues

Similar to adjusting the processing time balance between background and foreground programs, you can decide whether to optimize the use of your installed memory for your programs (usually preferred because that’s where you probably spend most of your time working). Or for best use of your system cache (which may be preferred in some circumstances which is useful if most of your work isn’t in using applications actively but running applications that may sit idle or just calculating things for a prolonged period of time).

By default, this Windows performance option is set to optimize memory use for programs. To change it, take these steps:

  1. Double-click System in Control Panel.

  2. Choose the Advanced tab and then click Settings listed under Performance.

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  3. Select the Advanced tab (again).

  4. Under Memory Usage, click System Cache. Click OK.

Page File Issues

The Windows page file is the available area of your hard drive that gets lumped into one huge, hidden “file” named pagefile.sys. Pagefile.sys acts like memory (hence the name virtual memory) for use by the system when your available physical memory is otherwise occupied with other jobs. The Windows page file may be familiar to you under different names, including the paging file, the virtual memory file, or the swap file.

How large this file is depends on a few factors, but primarily on how much physical memory you have installed on your PC. The formula Windows uses by default is that size of the page file should be equal to 1.5 times the amount of installed memory. Thus, if you have 128MB of installed memory, your page file is likely between 180MB and 192MB in size.

Often, people try to adjust these settings either up or down just to see what gives them the best “feeling” in terms of overall desktop performance and how fast you can open and close different files in different applications.

By default, Windows manages the page file (its size and location) for you. Yet it allows you to adjust the size of this page file; you can make it larger or smaller, depending on your particular needs and any performance issues you may see. However, adjusting a page file too far in either direction may negatively impact your performance. If you choose to adjust the page file, you may need to try different settings until you find the one that feels best to you from a performance perspective.

To check your page file settings or to make adjustments to it, follow these steps:

  1. From Control Panel, double-click System.

  2. Select the Advanced tab and then click Settings listed under Performance.

  3. Choose the Advanced tab again and click Change listed under Virtual Memory.

  4. From the Virtual Memory window, select the drive where your paging file is located and check the information available.

  5. If you wish to make a change to your page file, click Custom Size and then specify the size (in MB) that you want to use instead.

  6. Click Set and then click OK.

Depending on the changes you make, if any, you may be prompted to restart your system.

You also have the option to store this page file on another drive besides the drive that contains your Windows installation. Doing so may improve your performance.

Warning 

Place the page file on another hard drive, not on another partition on the same hard drive as the partition that contains Windows, for the best results.



PC Disaster and Recovery
PC Disaster and Recovery
ISBN: 078214182X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 140
Authors: Kate J. Chase

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