Windows Vista Performance Tuning Your System

French | Spanish | Portuguese | Italian | German | Japanese | Chinese | Korean | Russian | Arabic

Compared to most machines, a computer requires virtually no maintenance. That’s because there are fewer moving parts compared to other machines. The vast majority of the components in the computer are lots of little electrons whizzing around at the speed of light through microscopically small wires. The real workhorse of your computer is its central processing unit (CPU). It’s a tiny chip that’s smaller than your thumbnail, and there are several brands and models of them on the market, including Intel’s Core Duo, Pentium and Celeron processors, and AMD’s Dual Core, Athlon, and Sempron processors, among others. The information on which the CPU does its work is stored in random access memory (RAM), often referred to as memory. The memory in your computer is just a few thumbnail-sized chips, and again there are no moving parts. The hard disk determines how long it takes to open and save files. As you’ll learn in this article, there are ways to control how Windows uses the CPU and memory. And there are things you can do to keep your hard disk running at tiptop speed.

Getting to Know Your System

A computer system is made up of many different components. The two main components that make up the actual “computer” are the CPU and RAM. The overall speed of your system is largely determined by the speed of your CPU, and the amount of RAM in your system. The speed of a CPU is measured in gigahertz (GHz), billions of instructions per second, or for slower systems in megahertz (MHz), millions of instructions per second. The amount of RAM determines how much data the CPU can work with at any one time without accessing the much slower hard disk. RAM chips do come in various speeds. But the amount of RAM you have, more so than its speed, really determines the overall speed of your system. We generally measure RAM in megabytes (MB), and a megabyte is roughly a million bytes. A gigabyte (GB) is 1,024 megabytes. A byte, in turn, is the amount of space it takes to store a single character such as the letter “A.” In short, the faster your CPU and the more RAM you have, the faster your computer can get things done, and the less time you have to wait.

Knowing your CPU and RAM

To see the brand name and speed of your processor and the amount of RAM you have, right-click your Computer icon from the Start menu and choose Properties. Or click Show More Details in the Information Center. Or, Tap the Windows key, type sys, and click System.

The Windows Experience Index provides a quick snapshot of the major components that determine how you experience Windows Vista on your computer. Windows Experience Index

The first thing most people will notice is the Windows Experience Index. It is not a measure of your computer’s overall speed or ability. Rather, it’s an indicator of the weakest component in the system, the one that’s most likely to give you a less than optimal experience. That experience includes things like 3D gaming and 3D modeling, things that many people don’t even do with their computers. So don’t interpret the value as being a general measure of your computer’s overall performance. For a better understanding of what the number means, click the Windows Experience Index link next to the number.

Windows Vista Maximizing CPU and Memory Resources

Your operating system (Windows Vista) takes care of managing the CPU and memory for you. It does this behind the scenes in such a way that a person could use a computer productively for his or her entire life without ever knowing that CPU and RAM exist. When you use an application program (which is basically any program you start from the Start menu), you control the action by choosing menu commands and so on. In addition to the application programs you choose, RAM needs to maintain copies of certain processes that perform various day-to-day chores behind the scenes. Open application programs and processes both take up some space in RAM, and both require some CPU resources to do their jobs.

Priorities, foreground, and background

Your computer’s CPU and RAM are very busy places. To keep the computer running at tip-top speed, and to ensure that the computer responds immediately to everything you do at your mouse and keyboard, Windows prioritizes tasks that need to be done. Your application programs always run in the foreground, which means that when you click an item with your mouse or do something at the keyboard, fulfilling that request gets top priority in terms of being sent to the CPU for execution. Most processes, by comparison, run in the background. This means that they get a lower priority and have to momentarily step aside when you tell Windows or an application to do something. For example, printing a document is treated as a low-priority background process, and for a good reason. All printers are basically slow, mechanical devices anyway. So, by making printing a low-priority process, you can continue to use your computer at near normal speeds while the printer is slowly churning out its printed pages.

Controlling CPU priorities

By default, programs that you’re using are given a higher priority than background processes. It’s possible to reverse that by giving processes a higher priority than applications. Offhand, I can’t think of any reason why a normal person would want to reverse the order. If you want to make sure that your applications are getting top priority, as they should be, follow these steps:

1. Right-click your Computer icon from the Start menu, and choose Properties to open the System window for your system.

The System icon in Control Panel also opens the System window. If Control Panel opens in Category view, click System and Maintenance to get to the System icon. If the Control Panel opens in Classic view, double-click the System icon.

2. Click the Advanced system settings link on the left side of the screen to bring up the System Properties dialog box. Click the Advanced tab in the System Properties dialog box.

3. Under the Performance heading, click the Settings button. The Performance Options dialog box opens.

4. In the Performance Options dialog box, click the Advanced tab The Processor Scheduling options determine whether your actions, or processes, get top priority when vying for CPU resources to do their jobs. If you choose Background Services, your computer may not be as responsive as you’d like. So, you always want to choose Programs under Processor Scheduling.

Choosing Background Services won’t make your printer print any faster. There’s really nothing you can do to speed printing, other than use the printer’s Draft mode (if it has one). But even so, printers are just inherently slow mechanical devices. Not even a supercomputer can make a printer run any faster than the printer’s mechanics allow. Reliability and Performance Monitor Reliability and Performance Monitor provides a centralized interface for watching detailed performance metrics of your system.

The Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor is a tool for monitoring your computer’s performance. You can get to it in a couple ways. From the keyboard, Tap the Windows key, type reli, and click Reliability and Performance Monitor. Optionally, you can take the more traditional route through the Start menu:

1. Click the Start button, right-click the Computer icon, and choose Properties.

2. Click the Windows Experience Index link in the middle of the System window.

3. Click Advanced tools in the left column.

4. Click the Open Reliability and Performance Monitor link.

You may need to escalate your privileges by clicking Continue or by entering the password for an administrative account.  The lines that appear in the charts are measures of resource usage. The default page for the Diagnostic Console shows four graphs, CPU, Disk, Network, and Memory, and is known as the Resource Overview screen. These are the core hardware components for your system and usually dictate the overall performance of your system. Below the four graphs are expandable areas that provide additional details about each of the graphs. By clicking the arrow on the right side of the screen, you’ll expand more detail about each resource. Each section provides additional columns of information specific to that resource. The Diagnostic Console provides you with several methods for finding bottlenecks in your system. It first includes ways to monitor the health of both hardware and software of your system. The console also provides a way to store the information gathered by the monitors. Finally, the interface provides an advanced reporting interface for analyzing the data gathered by the application. Each of the different areas are covered in the following sections.

Monitoring tools

The monitoring tools included in the Diagnostic Console provide you with methods to analyze the system performance at a deeper depth than what Task Manager provides.

Performance Monitor

Performance Monitor, included in Vista, has also been available under previous versions of Windows. It provides an interface for viewing performance counters on your system.

Performance Monitor is a very complex application and could easily cover several articles of detail. For this reason, I’m only covering some of the basic functions of the application. To get more information, search for Performance Monitor under Windows Help and Support.

The line crossing the screen as you watch the performance monitor plots your system’s CPU activity. The graph has a timeline along the bottom and a percentage on the side. Only tracking the CPU doesn’t provide much more information than what Task Manager provides. By adding counters to the grid, you can track your system’s performance. To add more counters to the graph, follow these steps:

1. Start by clicking the plus (+) sign in the toolbar located just above the graph.

2. The Add Counters dialog box, shows all of the available performance objects for your system. In the left column, click the arrow to the right of the performance objects to expand and display the available counters for that object.

3. Depending on the counter you select, you may also have the option of selecting an instance of that counter. In the case of the Network Interface object, there are multiple network interfaces on my computer, as shown in the Instance of selected objects list box. I selected the Bytes Total/sec as the counter and then chose the wireless adapter on my system for the instance.

4. Optionally, you can check the Show description checkbox so you can view additional information about the counter.

5. Click the Add button to move the selection over to the Added counters section of the window.

6. When you’ve selected all of the counters you want to monitor, click the OK button to return to the graph.

Data Collectors are made up of three types of data, event trace,configuration, and performance data, each described here:

- Event Trace data: This data is gathered when different system events occur on your system.

- Configuration data: This data is gathered from changes that occur to the registry of your system.

- Performance data: This information is the same information that you’re able to gather from Performance Monitor, discussed earlier in the article.

You’re able to create your own user-defined Data Collector Sets, which involves adding data from one of the three categories. From the properties window of the collector, you’re able to set a schedule if you’d like the collection to fire off on a regular basis, and you’re also able to set stop conditions based on the duration of the collection or amount of data that it’s collected.