How Well does your PC Perform?

If you’re running a machine with Windows 2000 Professional or Server, you can easily analyze its performance using the Performance Monitor. This can be useful for both network administrators and individual users because it measures performance of everything from memory, processor, and hard disk, to server, network throughput, and your Internet connection. You can also create scheduled logs to analyze later, and alerts to pop-up messages whenever an error occurs.

Let’s see how.

First, run Performance Monitor from Control Panel>Administrative Tools buy clicking on the applet called Performance. The program window opens up in Microsoft Management Console, which is split into two Window panes. The left has two sections called System Monitor and Performance Logs and Alerts. To view performance information in real time, select System Monitor by clicking once on it, and move the mouse cursor to the right hand pane. Right-click the mouse here, and choose Add Counters from the menu that pops up. Here, you can select the component you want to monitor, such as the processor or memory, and choose which parameter of the component to monitor. For instance, you can choose processor and %Processor Time to see how busy your CPU really is. If it goes above 80 percent, for instance, then you better detect the service causing that.

Coming to Performance Logs and Alerts. Here, you can set counters, traces, and alerts. Counters create log files for all the counters, which you can view later. The way to do this is again the same as adding counters in System Monitor. Click on one of the options (counters, trace, or alerts). Right-click on the right-hand pane, and choose New Log Settings. You’ll have to give the log a name. Call it what you’re measuring. The next window has three tabs. The General tab let’s you add the counters you want to log, intervals to sample between, and the time unit, be it seconds, minutes hours, or days. In the Log Files tab, define how to save the files, whether in Text or Binary. The last tab is to schedule the log. Trace logs measure data continuously rather than periodically as in performance logs. Finally, the Alerts can be set to alert you when a counter goes above or below a predefined setting.