Curious about your computer's performance?

[Sonny Taylor]

Do you really want to know more about your computer? Do you have the time, patience and curiosity?

Some of you technically inclined people likely already know a about "Sysinternals".

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

This suite of programs tunes you into the some of the internals of Microsoft operating systems. Interesting too is that Microsoft appears to fully endorse Mark Rossinovich's private efforts to expose their operating system performance in graphic terms.

If you like the windows task manager, you'll be blown away by this. You have to download it and extract a ZIP file to a target folder.

There are numerous options in each of the following programs but here are the programs I found most useful so far.

procexp64.exe

This could be considered a complete replacement for Windows Task Manager. You may need to fart around a bit, but you can configure it to offer you more overview detail.

RamMap64.exe

Shows you detailed information on RAM usage including how much data is being cached from the hard drive.

AutoRuns64.exe

Details of what processes and services are being started up on your machine when booting up. This is far more detailed than what windows (shall I say) admits to with MSConfig running from a command line.

There's more that I haven't explored, but Mr. Rossinovich has put a lot of effort into this and kept it up to date.

His project started in 1996, but apparently he hasn't stopped yet.

[TylerM4]

I'm surprised sysinternals still lives on! I was using some of his tools long ago (like 15 years ago)back before the company was bought out and Mark became a MS employee. Figured that MS taking ownership would result in a slow death.

sysprep FTW!

[Sonny Taylor]

I'm surprised sysinternals still lives on! I was using some of his tools long ago (like 15 years ago)back before the company was bought out and Mark became a MS employee. Figured that MS taking ownership would result in a slow death.

sysprep FTW!

I've been using SysInternals for almost that long as well. The motivation to use it came from my past career as a system performance specialist (mostly resource bottleneck analysis) and capacity planning.

I admit that I can't keep my fingers off operating system software internals. That's hobby now as in the past, but it led me to career in the past. And I once again give a big thumbs up to Mark. Amazing coding with very deep understanding.