Whenever my computer or anyone elses is slow and I ask about it either here, on other boards or in person I always get the response ‘there are tons of things that can slow a computer’ including hackers, viruses, a weak CPU, spyware, lack of RAM, lack of available RAM, background programs, etc. etc. However I don’t know how to check to determine which one actually is the cause.
Is there a software program that will run a program through a system and detect where the bottlenecks occur instead of the person having to personally check everything? ie, a program where if there are 40-50 potential bottlenecks it tests all of them and shows you which one(s) actually are causing your bottleneck?
Not that I am using the ‘google is your friend’ answer, but google is quite good for finding out what most of those processes are. If you find one that is using a lot of cpu time chances are google knows what it is.
The problem with that is that even when the CPU is only at 4% sometimes it takes 15 seconds to open a window on some computers i’ve used, so the CPU alone isn’t the only source of bottlenecks.
Note that some baddies install themselves with random file names so they can’t be easily recognized, so it is easily possible to have something bad on your system and it won’t be in that list.
You have to be pretty geeky to get much more useful info out of the task manager, but on a typical system where you are just surfing the net, most of the CPU time will go to the system idle task, which is just a “fake” task that windows runs when there’s nothing else for it to do. On my system right now, the system idle task is taking 98 percent of the CPU time, which means that my computer is really only using 2 percent of its CPU time.
If I click on the performance tab, I can see that on my box I still have about 40 MB of physical ram that is not being used. On an XP box with only 128 MB of ram to start with, and about half a dozen windows open, this is ok. If it gets down to only having a few MB of ram left free, things will really start slowing down.
If your computer is low on free physical ram, and the programs that are using up all of the ram are programs that you really do use and not just spyware, then you know you need to install more physical ram in the machine.
I’m not aware of any one program that will check all of this stuff and is designed for a relatively non-geeky person to use.
Minus any other analysis, one approach is to knock off unneeded things until performance improves when you find the one that’s hogging resources, whether it’s taking a lot of CPU time or not. The late unlamented MS “fastfind” process often showed up this way.
Norton System Doctor, a tool included in Norton SystemWorks, is good for determining whether your computer is bottlenecked by memory or CPU issues. Windows has a built-in performance monitor tool that is also fairly useful. I’d also recommend a benchmark utility like SiSoftware Sandra that can compare your computer’s performance with similarly-equipped machines and suggest ways you could improve your performance. I would not recommend anything advertised by spam, because you may end up with malware.