Windows Performance Monitor is a basic benchmarking tool included with Windows Vista and Windows 7. It helps you locate bottlenecks and helps you by bringing nearly all the performance affecting options together in one place.

BeYourOwnIT gives you a tour of the functionality of the Windows Performance Monitoring tool in this video.

Hello, welcome to a free tutorial brought to you by beyourownit.com. Today we’re going to be talking a little bit about the Window’s Vista performance and monitoring utility. It really is more than just a report card. It’s more of a benchmark. It kind of tells you where your system bottlenecks with hardware. A lot of times there’s all sorts of benchmark programs out on the web. The Windows one isn’t the most amazing groundbreaking, but what’s nice about it is it kind of puts everything in perspective for you.

So to see this go to control panel, then you want to go to system and maintenance, and then inside the system and maintenance is the performance information and tools.

Now, really what’s cool about the benchmarking tool or the performance monitoring utility is the quick tools it has on the left here. So what you’re going to see is the processor. It tells you memory, graphics, gaming graphics, primary hard disk. Your base score is determined by what your lowest score is. So according to this, my graphics card is what’s holding me back.

Now, you can learn more by going to view and print details. This will tell you a little bit more. Kind of goes through and tells you what they look at. So it looks at your storage, your graphics card, network adapters and things like that. You can also update your score when you update certain hardware. Now, I’m shooting this on a laptop, so obviously really the only thing I can upgrade its RAM.

But what’s really cool about this is on the left hand side you can manage your start‑up programs, which is one of the big things you can do to keep your computer booting up faster, or just visual effects which will allow you to slow down the amount of things that are going on in the background that can oftentimes slow down your computer. Adjust your indexing options, your power options. You can open your disk clean‑up right from here and there’s a whole series of advanced tools here as well. So you can look at your disk defragmenter, check your system health report, all sorts of great things right from this tool.

Now, this is seldom used by most computer users, but if you’re sitting on a 2.0 or 2.5 on memory, for example, and everything else is fives or five threes or sixes or sevens it’s a simple fix and you can really understand what you need to do to get your numbers up. They offer an explanation here. What do these numbers mean? It’ll help describe how they benchmark it and everything.

The performance and monitoring tool is a great spot to start, again, not only from the fact that they help calculate your score here, but by the tools they offer here right on the left‑hand side.

So I hope this video was helpful and you can see videos like this and many more at our website at beyourownit.com.