Perhaps what is most overlooked when people talk about Vista are the
tools it provides the power user looking to get that last ounce of
performance out of their system, or to the sysadmin with OCD who simply
must know where every bit of his system resources are going. Vista
comes packed with some of the best information tools I've seen on a
system without having to fork over a lot of cash. The generally
outstanding quality of the tools though makes it extremely difficult to
understand why Microsoft crippled one of the most used system tools...
the Disk Defragmenter.
In Windows 2000 and XP, the Defragmenter was a wonderful utility. It
was informative, useful and very effective. It would give you a little
chart showing you how badly your drive was fragmented and a very
detailed report of the analysis so you had some idea of whether or not
you really needed to defragment. What do you have in Windows Vista?
That's right... you get NOTHING. There is no information period
available through this tool. No chart, no report, just something where
you can press a button and you're then treated to a "This may take from
a few minutes to a few hours" message while it churns away. No
indication of progress. You just sit and wait... and wait and wait some
more. Normally your system will attempt to do this automatically based
on a schedule. Good for maintaining system health, bad if you're trying
to track down a problem.
There is an advanced defrag tool available via the admin command
prompt, but it's text only. You can get your analysis information from
this tool however, so I get the feeling I'll rely more heavily on this
method.
That brings me to my second annoyance about the power user aspects of
Vista. If you want to run anything from the command line that is even
remotely administratively related, you have to do it from the
Administrative Command Prompt. Do you know how to do that? No? Well I
had to dig in the help files to find out. To access the Admin Command
Prompt, you have to type "command prompt" into the search bar on the
Start Menu, and when it shows in the search box, right click on it and
select "Run As Administrator". This combined with the UAC system
enabled by default will frustrate power users to no end (UAC is disabled
through the User control panel, not the Security Center). This is one
place where I wish Microsoft had borrowed more heavily from Apple and
would let users enter administrative mode from any command prompt
window.
But annoyances aside, there is a LOT of great stuff hidden under the
covers that I wish Microsoft had pushed more. These are features I
never would have found had Brad and GreenReaper not shown them to me.
So travel along with me, as we explore (at a high level) the
Performance Information & Tools built into Windows Vista.
First off, you see the now well-known Vista "Score". Little
explanation is given as to why you achieved a certain score, but there
it is. I'm not even sure even what the scale is. So a 3.6 doesn't tell
me a whole lot unless applications start coming out with stickers saying
"Runs best on Windows Vista machines with a score of 3 or higher" But
it's still nice having a little bit of benchmarking built-in, and you
can compare numbers with your friends for bragging rights.
The
meat of the Performance & Information Tools panel is on the left where
you'll see a number of "Tasks"
- Manage startup programs
Remember msconfig from 9x/2k/XP? Windows Defender has taken on a
bit of that role. This is where you'll turn on and off programs and
scripts that kick off when Windows starts up. This is the first
place to look if booting up your box takes too long. The msconfig
tool still exists for people looking for greater control.
- Adjust visual effects
This is mislabeled really, since only the first tab is about the
visual effects. The Visual Effects tab lets you enable and disable
a bunch of little visual bits such as drop shadows, animations, the
glass effect etc. This window also offers the Advanced and Data
Execution Prevention tabs. Advanced is where you determine general
processor prioritization and virtual memory. The Data Execution
Prevention tab is where you can enable/disable/modify DEP settings,
which supposedly protects you from viruses that try and execute code
from sections of memory normally reserved for Windows or other
common applications.
- Adjust indexing options
Opens the Indexing Options control panel. Nothing new to see here.
- Adjust power settings
Opens the power settings control panel where you set power
behaviors. Pretty standard from XP. Nothing new.
- Open Disk Cleanup
Opens the Disk Cleanup utility... This utility looks the same as it
did in XP
- Advanced Tools
This is where things start to get interesting. These are the tools
that really let you dive in and see what's going on with your PC at
a level you might not have considered before. Some of these tools
are redundant from the main Control Panel view, or even the screen
directly prior to this. Tools we've already discussed are:
- Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows
This is just "Adjust visual effects
- Open Disk Defragmenter
- Generate a system health report
Uses some of the data collectors mentioned below in the
Reliability & Performance Monitor to give you a very detailed
report of how your PC is doing.
Lets take a look at a few of the more interesting advanced tools for
monitoring and improving system performance.
The New Event Viewer
Most
power users remember the Event Viewer from Win9x/2k/XP and how it
really didn't give you much information at all, and what it did give
you wasn't always useful. In Vista, the Event Viewer has been
pumped up with some serious steroids! Now you don't just have your
standard list of Application, Security System and Internet
Explorer. Now, you have at the top level:
- Custom Views
Build your own event filter
- Windows Logs
The event logs we all know and love
- Application and Services Logs
Event logs for dozens of individual components of Windows
Vista. You can dig as far down as being able to see events
related to the system's Reliability Analysis Engine. Kernel
events are here, diagnostic events, logon service, remote
desktop, UAC, you name it and it's probably recorded here.
As you can see by the screenshot above, we've moved into the
realm of serious data gathering. The left column holds all the
potential event log filters you may be interested in. The center
has the event list and then the event details below. The details
tab on the lower half of the center panel can give you a more
detailed break-down, either in a "friendly mode" or in straight XML,
the format all of this information is stored in normally.
Having the data stored in XML will likely make it much easier for
developers to extract and analyze event log data in their own
applications.
Beyond that you have the column on the right. This is a
context-sensitive menu of options depending on what current log
you're looking at. Generally it will let you do the following:
- Open Saved Logs
- Create Custom Views
- Import Custom Views
- Add filters to your current log
- Find events in the current log
- Save events in the custom view
It will also let you inspect events and view properties, and even
attach automated system actions to certain events. Basic tasks are
limited to sending an email, launching an application or displaying
a message on screen. This can be helpful if you're trying to track
down what specific task may be kicking off an error. The task
created gets added to the Task Scheduler tool if you want to ever go
back and edit it.
All-in-all, the new Event Viewer is a GREAT tool for
troubleshooting and finally does a good job of giving you access to
the information you need.
Reliability and Performance Monitor
This
is the real meat-and-potatoes of the advanced system tools in
Windows Vista. This tool gives you diagnostic information on your
CPU, Disk, Network and Memory hardware. It will track what
processes are currently causing a read/write to your hard drive,
what applications are reaching out to the network and what they're
trying to do, as well as a detailed break-down of memory and CPU
usage far above and beyond what you've seen in the Task Manager
under 2k/XP.
The main view shows you four graphs and four sub-sections on the
right main section of the screen. Each graph and each sub-section
correspond to one of your four main system resources: CPU, Disk,
Network and Memory. The subsections expand by clicking on them to
give you an even more detailed break-down of what's happening on the
chart above. This is where you'll see which processes are touching
your disk, or using your network connection. The graphs will
automatically scale to adapt to your usage levels. When I took the
above screenshot, I wasn't doing anything network intensive.
Digging in deeper, there is the Performance Monitor which will
continually graph your overall system performance. By default it
does a line chart of your CPU usage. You can easily add additional
"Counters" for the monitor to track. I added Disk Write and Disk
Read times to mine. Now I can see how well my disk is doing
overall. You can track just about any parameter of system
performance in this view. Very helpful in seeing if your system
being slow is just your imagination, and if it's not, where the
slowdown may be occurring.
After
the Performance Monitor is the Reliability Monitor. This will give
you a high-level view of a few key metrics that may impact your
overall system stability. It tracks Software Install/Uninstalls,
Application Failures, Hardware Failures, Windows Failures and Misc
Failures. It will pull the relevant system event data and make it
readily available. With this information you can track down when
your system first started having stability issues, and maybe even
track down what is causing it.
Of particular interest to me in this view is the space for
hardware failures. Will Windows Vista be able to detect and
properly log major and minor hardware failures? If so, this will be
a huge help to people who find themselves trying to track down bad
RAM, or maybe a video card that's about to eat itself.
The rest of the tool is dedicated to all sorts of customizable
"Data Collector Sets" where you can have the system track any number
of system characteristics. The amount of detail that can be trapped
in these collectors and thus presented in the reports, is
staggering. It will tell you more about your hardware than you were
likely to ever want to know, you'll be able to trace exactly what is
happening on your system at any given time. Have an application
consistently erroring out? Fire up a data collector, then open the
bad app, once it crashes out, stop the collector and take a look at
the report. You'll get a very detailed look at the state of your
system when the crash occurs.
The long and short of the performance tool is that power users,
technicians, and even developers will have a lot more power and
information at their fingertips when tracking down problems and
trying to fix them. Just knowing what processes are causing your
hard drive to grind away will likely make many people very happy.
Gamers looking to eke out that last frame of performance from their
games will want to pay VERY close attention to the information this
tool gives them.
There are many other little bits and pieces embedded in Windows Vista
that will appeal to the power user, tools such as the "Snipping Tool"
for grabbing screenshots of only certain portions of the screen. To
find and talk about all of the little bits and pieces though hidden away
in Vista though would result in a much longer article than this already
is. For the time being, be content with the immense power provided in
the Reliability & Performance Monitor alone.