Having been away from heavy PC use for a while, it’s been, um, interesting to dive back into the deep end of the pool.
I’m learning — or in many cases, re-learning — the myriad little tweaks and tricks that can make things work better.
Small example: I wanted to verify that my hard drives were healthy. Instead of finding and installing a current SMART monitor, I remembered to simply type the command…
wmic diskdrive get status
… in an admin-level command window. Easy peasy, and almost instantaneous. (And all my attached drives were OK, as I’d hoped.)
I was also happy to renew my acquaintance with Perfmon, Windows’ built-in performance-monitoring tool.
Windows is constantly monitoring its own health and keeping copious logs about any and all errors, large and small, that your system experiences as it runs. Perfmon not only lets you easily explore this information, but also lets you run a quick 60-second performance check at any time, on demand.
Just open an admin-level command window and enter…
perfmon /report
… and perfmon will take over.
First, it quietly collects data for about 60 seconds. (Fig 1.)
Note that Perfmon is not, repeat not, a benchmarking tool — it’s not trying to generate a “score” to compare your system to others. Rather, it’s a diagnostic tool that watches your system for any kinds of errors, unexpected responses, or other out-of-bounds conditions that crop up in major subsystems, as your PC runs. Thus, you can continue to use your system, or not, as the data-collection takes place.
After 60 seconds, you’ll see Perfmon’s main page with 11 categories displayed (the exact number may vary somewhat from system to system). On my system, I got these: Diagnostic results, Warnings, Performance, Software configuration, Hardware configuration, CPU, Network, Disk, Memory, and Statistics. (Fig 2.)
Each category title is a pull-down that reveals the information within that category. (Fig 3.)
Here, I’ve pulled down the “Diagnostic results,” and you can see two error conditions that Perfmon found on my system: Two audio devices are disabled.
Actually, I disabled them myself, to work around problems caused by Win10’s new ‘Memory Integrity’ feature. (See “Win10’s new ‘Memory integrity’ feature breaks VirtualBox, other software;” https://langa.com/index.php/2018/08/11/win10s-new-memory-integrity-feature-breaks-virtualbox-other-software/)
Although the work-around is OK — my PC audio is working — Perfmon’s report serves as a reminder that my OEM drivers are aging fast, and are preventing Windows from running as well as it could.
Work through the Perfmon reports for your system, and you’ll find detailed information on hundreds or even thousands of data points across your entire PC: Each performance category contains data that tells you what’s working OK and what, if anything, isn’t.
Perfmon, please to re-make your acquaintance!
Permalink: https://langa.com/index.php/2018/08/11/old-dog-relearns-old-tricks-wmic-and-perfmon/
