Reliability and Performance in Vista - it's all about what you know

Saska — Sat, 20 May 2006 01:25:00 GMT

How often have you listened to your hard disk grinding like a rock tumbler and opened Task Manager, only to wonder whether the application at the top of the processor consumption list was really the one rearranging every 1 and 0 on your drive? Have you ever looked askance at the I/O lights on your cable modem and wondered why they were blinking while you sat idle, reading a web page?

We're just around the bend from the official Beta 2 release of Windows Vista, and I'm excited. Although I've run it here at work for months, I've been waiting to load Vista on my home computer until that official Beta 2 milestone.

When it comes to new operating systems, I'm not usually an early adopter. My desktop is familiar, my shortcuts efficient, my computing routines... well, routine. I like to play with new technology, but I want my desktop to be dependable. So why, if I have access to Vista systems at work, am I champing at the bit to put it on my precious home computer?

One word: Control.

Although there are many things about Vista that are more secure, from drivers that dynamically reload without requiring the OS to shut down to better protection of your system files from unauthorized modification, the control I'm talking about is the control that comes from what you know.

Only the most serious enthusiasts and system administrators seem to be familiar with the Performance Monitoring tools built into previous versions of Windows. The basis of pre-Vista performance monitoring was the perfmon MMC snap-in, with a real-time display called System Monitor. Add-ons for it included Performance Logs and Alerts and Server Performance Advisor. When you knew enough about performance data to organize and collect information, these were a powerful combination - but in the end most folks still went to Task Manager for their short-term, what-the-heck-is-going-on-now? needs. In Vista, I believe that will change.

Check out this Resource View screen shot for an idea of what I mean. Processor, disk, network and memory usage are all broken down not just by application, but by application instance, in real time. I'm pretty sure the grinding I hear right now on my XP workstation is my antivirus software updating its definitions... but if I were running Vista, I'd know for sure.

Stay tuned for the Windows Vista Beta 2 launch and lots more about how to know your system.

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Reliability and Performance in Vista - it's all about what you know