We all know that the way your resources are allocated in your system plays an important role in how the performance of the said system will be.
When the computer is slow, we typically open the Task Manager and look for the culprit by looking at the CPU and Memory columns.
Well, same thing here, but better.
In the performance tab of the the Windows 7 Task Manager, there is a button that opens the Resource Monitor.
This is new to Windows 7 and you can also open it directly by doing ‘Run’ and then ‘resmon’.
Let’s explore what’s in it.
Here is a screenshot of the overview:
As you can see, in the overview tab, there are expandable areas for CPU, Disk, Network and Memory.
There are also tabs for each one of these, in which you have a bit more detail.
In the CPU area you can right-click on one of the process
and you’ll get the options to end or suspend the process, but also to ‘search online’ which basically opens your default browser and searches for myprocess.exe on Google, and to ‘Analyze wait chain’.
The last one tells you either that the process runs normally, or that it is waiting for another process to finish in order for your process to continue.
This is good to see why a window is unresponsive for example.
You can also select the process and click End Process. No need to explain what it does.
It looks like this:
Let’s now look at the different tabs in more detail.
The CPU tab:
In the CPU tab, you have lists of Processes, Services, but also Associated Handles and Associated Modules.
The last two are empty until you select a process, not by highlighting it but by selecting the box.
The filtered areas get highlighted.
Also, note that you can select and view multiple processes, but all the selected ones go to the top of the list of processes.
This way you don’t have to run after the selected process up and down the list when it has a sudden change in the number of threads for example.
When you select a process, it stays selected across the tabs and you see only the info relevant to this process.
You can also stop and start Services from here, as well as search Handles (look at the search box in the Associated Handles area).
The Associated Handles shows you the registry keys, the files and the directories used by the process.
The Memory tab:
The only interesting thing here is the grey area on the left.
This is actually the amount of RAM I’m losing because I’m using the 32-bit version of Windows.
In the 64-bit version this grey chunk is almost inexistent.
The Disk tab:
The good thing here is that only the processes that have disk activity are shown.
If you select one of them, it will filter the files in the Disk Activity area so that you can see exactly which files are used by the selected process.
The Network tab:
This is nice as well, you get to see all the Network Activity very clearly.
Here you can see the ports used by your applications, you can see the firewall status (look at the bottom right corner), and you can see the bandwidth used by an app.
That’s the place to go if you feel that one of your application is taking up all the bandwidth.
Here, as well as in the Disk tab, when you select a process, you see its graph on the right highlighted in orange.
This is all very useful, and all very tidy.
The user is not overwhelmed by unnecessary data and the filtering and the highlighting make it all very easy to use.
