1. Home
  2. Electronics Design
  3. The Biggest Mistake in Windows 7 and such, Task manager does not focus on harddisk performance !

The Biggest Mistake in Windows 7 and such, Task manager does not focus on harddisk performance !

It's time to discuss and inform you of what has been bothering me for quite some time now.

It's how Windows/The Task Manager presents the "performance of the computer".

In my daily usage it's not the CPU or the Memory usage which decides the experience.

It's mostly the harddisk and the constant harddisk/pagefile swapping that determines the most annoying part of computer usage.

Stutters/slow downs and waits for loads. Especially while browsing.

I wish Task Manager would focus much more on harddisk loads and what is causing it.

Nowadays Firefox and many tabs are open and the task manager is nearly useless.

Firefox should have a built in task manager and show which tabs are using the harddisk and such.

I hope in the future when I do build a new PC, if I ever do build a new PC and when I will absolutely stuff it CHOKE full with RAM and some SSDs that this stutter shit will belong to the passed. However I fear the worst.

The nice thing about MS-DOS and it's programs was basically stutter free operation. It had sometimes a different feel to it.

Anyway Windows is still the "DISK OPERATING system" that ms-dos was.

And thus the focus on the most/fastest components of the system CPU and memory is just PLAIN wrong !

I do like virtual memory and it's memory block/page file swapping though, it allows running much more programs than ms-dos ever could and swapping between them as needed !

I can only hope that future operating systems focus more on the true and most annoying bottlenecks of the system ! ;)

Bye, Skybuck.

Reply to
skybuck2000
Loading thread data ...

I use a physically different drive, with partitions, for all my data and work files. When I made my new computer 2 years ago, I used a solid-state drive for C:, filled with the operating system and programs. This gives a fast quiet experience. I'm using Win 7.

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win
Reply to
Winfield Hill

If your machine is actually swapping, then you don't have enough RAM. In the Performance Monitor (perfmon.msc), the "page file use" is not how much swap your machine is using, but rather how much diskspace your OS has reserved to swapping.

To get the actual swap (pagefile) usage, run the Performance Monitor (perfmon), and Add Counters (The button with the "+" icon). It's the

8th one over, to the left of the X) -> Paging File -> % Usage -> Paging File -> % Usage Peak I prefer to monitor "Avg Disk Queue Length" and "Current Disk Queue Length" which tell me how far the hard disk drive is behind the operating system. Autoscaling makes a mess so I have the "Scale" factor set to 100 and 10 respectively to get a reasonable display. I have perfmon.msc start on boot (in the Startup folder) so that I can tell the disk activity has finally quieted down and the machine is ready to use.

Empty your unspecified cache. Firefox had a problem when they switched to the Quantum version that is easily fixed by clearing the cache.

Your task manager is out of focus?

Task Manager Add-on for Firefox: However, it was one of the numerous add-ons and extensions that didn't work after the switch to Quantum.

If you really want detailed system troubleshooting tools, I suggest Microsloth Sysinternals: Specifically, I suggest Process Explorer installable:: or stand alone: There are tutorials on the MS web pile and on YouTube on how to use it.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

The slight surprise in making this change is how much it speeds up web browsing which I would not have expected to be quite so disk bound. It isn't like my PC is short of physical memory so I am a bit surprised that it page swaps at all for routine web browsing (but it does).

Samsung SSDs now almost saturate a 6G link whereas spinning rust is roughly 20x slower. It makes a big difference to performance.

Some motherboards allow you to actively cache the most frequently used files off the spinning rust and/or a live ram image on suspend. I used that solution back when fast SSDs bigger than 32GB were very expensive and it worked fairly well but was "interesting" when things went wrong.

These days I just rely on a 500GB SSD for OS, programs and certain heavily used bulk data.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.