Monitoring PC System Resources

PCs & Laptops For Dummies

To monitor specific programs or activities on your PC, the best tool to use is the Resource Monitor. It's far less complicated than the Performance Monitor, and it offers more information and control than the Performance tab in the Task Manager.

To open the Resource Monitor, heed these directions:

Tap the Windows key.
Type resource.
Choose Resource Monitor Desktop app from the search results. The Resource Monitor window appears.

The Resource Monitor.

The Resource Monitor's Overview tab, shown here, shows the big picture on system resources: CPU (processor), Memory, Disk, and Network, along with charts for each.

The various tabs show more details and even more charts.

What's interesting about the Resource Monitor is that you can examine the effects of specific programs on resources. For example, shown here, the common service program svchost.exe is monitored. Its effect on resources is shown in each category (click the chevron to expand a category) as well as highlighted in each of the graphs. When you choose a program in this manner, you can spy on its effects on all resources.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.