Thread: Monitoring the entire system from a central location

Whenever you want to find the cause of a problem, you are interested in the currently running tasks, hard disk accesses and network activities. Windows should present this Information to you clearly using the standard tools.

With Resource Monitor, Vista has an efficient tool on board; it presents system information more clearly than the Task Manager. To start this feature, first open the Task manager and click 'Resource Monitor' in the 'Performance' tab. You need to authorize this action by selecting an account with administrator rights and entering the password. Resource Monitor will clearly display the data on a single page. The application window is sub-divided into five sections. The first, the 'Resource OverView', informs the user about the current status of the CPU, Disk, Network and Memory in four adjacent diagrams. The next four sections provide detailed system data, such as disk read and write accesses or CPU usage by individual processes, in tabular formats. You can open and close these sections by clicking either the title bar of the respective section or the corresponding diagram. The last section 'Further Information' contains links, which branch out to different help topics for the tool.

NOTE:

Resource Monitor is also a component of the broader tool 'Reliability and Performance Monitor', which gives information about the system stability of Vista. Start this tool by typing 'perfmon.exe' under 'Start | Start Search'; right click the search result and open 'Run as Administrator' from the context menu. Besides, you can get to the tool through 'System and Maintenance I Administration'. Right click 'Reliability and Performance Monitor' and select 'Run as Administrator' here as well.