Buried deep within the Windows Vista Control Panel is a cool tool that tells you exactly what’s up with your computer’s performance. This tool is called the Reliability and Performance Monitor. You may have had a little taste of this tool by clicking on the Performance tab of Task Manager. However, there’s far more to the Reliability and Performance Monitor than CPU and Memory Usage.
To launch the monitor, go into the Control Panel, click on Performance Information and Tools, and then click on Advanced. From there, click on Reliability and Performance Monitor. The main screen displays an overview of your computer’s current resource usage including real-time graphs detailing CPU, disk, memory, and network usage. Convenient down-arrows allow you to click to view further details such as which processes are running and how much processing power they are using up.
In the left side pane, you’ll see several options below the Reliability and Performance Monitor including Performance Monitor, Reliability Monitor, Data Collector Sets, and Reports.
The Performance Monitor is a simple graph that displays current performance data or performance data from log files. You can look at this data in graph form, report form, or as a histogram.
The Reliability Monitor displays a graph of the system’s stability using a “stability” index and “system stability” chart covering the computer’s lifetime. The System Stability Index uses a scale of 1 to 10 with one being the least stable and ten being the most stable. By looking at this chart, you can see your computer’s rating as well as specific events that have been flagged such as software installs and uninstalls, software failures, hardware failures, Windows failures, and miscellaneous failures. By default, the Reliability Monitor runs and collects system stability data.
Data Collector Sets provide the data that the Reliability and Performance Monitor relies on for monitoring and reporting. Windows Vista comes with several pre-made Data Collector Sets which should be extensive enough for most computer users. For those who want to monitor other functions, new Data Collector Sets can be created.
Reports are stored in the Reliability and Performance Monitor as well. If you have previously run System or User Defined reports, you can view them in this section. If you’d like to run a report, you must first go to the related Data Collector Set, right click it, and choose Start. The diagnostics take a few minutes to run. Once the diagnostics have completed, click on the related report and view the results.
The Reliability and Performance Monitor is a valuable tool that you can use to troubleshoot performance and reliability issues in real time. By checking this tool periodically, you can see just how well, or how poorly, your computer is running.
Celeste Stewart | September 6th, 2008
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