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Resolved Question

Performance question

Oct 28, 2011 8:18AM PDT

When my Windows xp SP3 system slows down, I usually look at the Task Manager to find the resource hog. My question is this- which of the columns is most important? Is it Memory Usage, Peak Mem Usage, Page Faults or I/O reads? On my PC, there are about 50-60 active processes. Since I cannot tell (by Image Name) what these processes are doing, I need to find the culprit. Once I know which resource is most important, I can try ending each (unnecessary) process one at a time.

Suggestions?

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WIth my XP system
Oct 28, 2011 8:33AM PDT

I always used to use the Processes tab of the Task Manager and the CPU column, (short for CPU Usage). I would click the CPU column header once or twice to list in CPU usage order so that the most usage processes were listed at the bottom.

50-60 processes is quite high for XP although every system is different of course. But I tried to keep mine down to mid 30s to 40.

Identifying what all these are is difficult, but I would first look at BlackViper's XP Services list to see what services you are running, and trim those down to only what is needed;
http://www.blackviper.com/2008/05/19/black-vipers-windows-xp-x86-32-bit-service-pack-3-service-configurations/

That should help remove some unwanted processes. For the rest of the processes, you would need to check each one in Google, and a good place to start is http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm

It's time consuming, but it doesn't all have to be done at one go.

Hope that helps.

Mark

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Answer
Good question.
Oct 28, 2011 8:25AM PDT

If it's the CPU you see the CPU topped out at 100% and then look for the hog.

HOWEVER if you have something doing disk i/o then it doesn't show there since the OS does not show that the process is blocked while the hard drive head is scurrying over to get the data.
Bob