Windows Resources

Where can I look to see what percent resources I have upon bottup. In Win98, I right-clicked on "my computer" and then hit the performance tab to see the resources available. But I can't find it in XP.

Related to this is the larger question of how to determine my XP machine's efficiency and performance. Do I have unnecessary programs loading at bootup? Would swap file and other performance tweaks make a difference in the speed and capability of the machine? In XP, I don't know where to go to examine these questions and boost performance.

Any suggestions?

 

Performance/Resources in XP can be seen by right clicking the Task Bar and choosing Task Manager from the menu.
In Windows Task Manager there's a Performance tab which shows CPU Usage and Page File Usage, and a Networking tab which shows traffic going through your Network Adapters.

For Tweaking I would first of all recommend that you get a hold of Microsoft Power Toys for XP. Specifically Tweak UI. These are more customizing tweakers more than performance tweakers but most are well worth having.

Other tweaks can be found at Windows Registry Guide, and here's a shareware program for tweaking XP: Tweak XP.

Hope this helps a bit.

 

Or for some excellent tweaking, go to the top of the page, click on the RoseCitySoftware.com button, and pick up a copy of Tweaking Toolbox XP which is recently released. Absolutely outstanding tweaking package specifically for XP (won't even run on anything else).

 

Thanks very much, Laage and Newt.

 

Btw, the task manager suggestion you offered doesn't exactly give you the percentage resources available in the way Win98 did.

Is there some other place to find that out?

 

XP handles "resources" very differently than any of the 9X systems do. It doesn't have all the built-in limiters.

Pretty much if you have physical memory, virtual memory, cpu cycles available and some free disk space, you are good to go.

If not (and there are some cases where this can happen) the possibilities are way too many and to specific to give the sort of "resources" summary that 9X will. It will be a matter of locating the problem area and usually making a registry tweak or two.

 

Thanks for the explanation, Newt.