The following discussion assumes you have installed the System Monitor program. If you can't find it, use the Add/Remove Programs utility in the Control Panel to add it. Click on the Windows Setup tab, click on Accessories (or System Tools, depending on your version of Windows) then on the Details button, and select System Monitor.
I'll first describe how to use the System Monitor in XP, because it is simpler. Use the following sequence: Start ® Control Panel ® Administrative Tools ® Performance. You will see a graph with three traces: (1) % Processor Time, (2) Ave. Disk Queue Length, and (3) Pages/sec. Leave this window open and do some of your usual work, looking at the graphs every so often. (1) shows the per cent of the time that the CPU is busy; if this frequently exceeds 80, you need a faster CPU. (2) shows how many disk write operations are waiting; if this often exceeds 2 plus the number of hard disks, you need faster disks. (3) shows how many 4-Kbyte pages per second move between RAM and your swap file; if this often exceeds 20, you need more RAM.
In Windows 95, 98, and Me, you access the performance monitor with the following sequence: Start ® Programs ® Accessories ® System Tools ® Performance. You will see a graph with only one trace, % Processor Usage, but you can add the other measures. Move the cursor over the leftmost icon in the performance window, and you should see a box containing "Add". Click on the icon, select File System, then Dirty Data, and click OK. Then click again on the same icon, select Memory Manager, then Page Faults, and click OK. The colorful term "Dirty Data" shows how many Bytes are waiting to be written to your disk, so it is related to the Average Disk Queue Length plotted in XP's monitor. Despite its name, a "Page Fault" is not an error; instead, it means that the CPU tried to access some data that was not in RAM, but had been moved to the swap file. (Data is swapped between RAM and the swap file in 4-Kbyte chunks called pages.) Thus, Page Faults per second is the same as the Pages/sec plotted by XP. If your % Processor
Usage frequently rises above 80 per cent, you need a faster processor, and if the Page Faults often exceed 20 per second, you need more RAM. Finally, you may want to consider a faster disk if it frequently rises about 20 Kbytes plus 10 Kbytes for each hard disk.
For both the XP and the 95-98-Me monitors, these measures are less quantitative than they sound, because we haven't defined "frequently" or what is typical for your PC's tasks. All of them are "peaky"; that is, they will jump up to a fairly high value for a few seconds than fall back down. So long as you see this sort of behavior, your PC is probably powerful enough; when they rise to high values and stay there, this is evidence of overload. Some programs, for example running a virus check or defragging a disk, will add a lot of stress. I've also found that Microsoft Access sometimes drives the CPU usage to 100 per cent for long periods. I suspect this would occur regardless of how fast your system is. You can also create an overload by having many programs running at once, but for most of us this isn't typical. Finally, there is interaction between the measures. For example, each page fault results in disk activity, so a high rate of page faults can cause a large disk queue.
There are many more quantities you can monitor, but these three are the ones most useful in determining if you need to upgrade your PC. Unfortunately, there is no tool to evaluate your video controller, but unless you are playing arcade type games or are doing high-resolution graphics, your present one is probably satisfactory. If the display seems sluggish, but the above three quantities are all reasonable, you might consider upgrading your video controller. You don't need a tool to check that your hard disk is large enough, because you can easily do this by looking the disk properties. Any disk that is more than about 80 per cent full is too small.
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