How can I Monitor the Performance of Individual Apps on Windows?

Question

My XP machine has become terribly slow and I want to identify the application at fault. It seems to be related to disk access rather than processor hogging. I can look at the task manager to get a good idea but it's not ideal. I was wondering if there was some application that can monitor all aspects of processes effectively. Is Process Explorer my only hope?

Answer 1

Download the free Sysinternals Tools, specifically Process Explorer. Why are you concerned about it?

You can do this with onboard tools in XP, but the Process Explorer is much more powerful.

Answer 2

TaskInfo isn't free but it's not too expensive & has a trial feature.

Answer 3

Use WinXP's Performance Monitor. (perfmon.exe)

From your description, it sounds like you might try adding the "Process" performance object. Then select which process(es) you want to monitor. Finally, select the counters you want to watch -- for your purposes, maybe "IO Data Bytes/sec", or one of the many similar counters.

It has a graphical display, and also generates a log.

Answer 4

The tools listed here are great but will probably not root out your issue. In my experience the three most common issues that cause performance like this are viruses, overzealous anti-virus software and defragmentation.

My suggestions:

1. If you have AV software, disable the "real-time" feature (this feature is called different names for different software). If that speeds things up, then you have your answer (please re-enable the feature if turning it off has no effect)
2. Make sure there are not any suspicious processes with a large # of handles open or high CPU usage. You probably already did this using Task Manager but I thought I would throw it in. If you find one research it on the web and make sure it is not a virus.
3. Check your defrag levels using the Windows XP Defragmenter. If it recommends a defrag, I would try a third-party defragmenter and steer clear of the one that comes with XP if possible.

First, try to delete as many files and uninstall as many unecessary programs as possible before defragmenting. More free disk space helps these tools perform better. I would say don't even try unless your have 33% or more of your disk free.

Some suggestions for defragmenters:

Free:

Smart Defrag

Auslogics Disk Defrag

$$$

DiskKeeper

Hope that helps