Windows' System Monitor Peeks Under a PC's Hood
Keep an eye on your PC's vital statistics with a virtual 'dashboard.'Kirk Steers
You can think of Windows 98's System Monitor as your PC's dashboard. Like the one in your car, it gives you an instant status report on your machine, and it will let you know when trouble is brewing under your PC's hood.
The System Monitor's real-time graphs provide a snapshot of key performance statistics. You can watch your system adjust its memory, CPU, and other settings in real time, which is great for optimizing or troubleshooting a PC.
You'll find System Monitor under Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools. If you don't see it there, install it from the Add/Remove Programs applet in Control Panel. Simply select the Windows Setup tab and click System Tools.
Once System Monitor is running, you need to determine the best way to display your chosen statistics. To add a statistic to the System Monitor screen, open the Edit menu, select Add Item, and pick a statistic from one of the seven categories shown.
Before adding items to view, however, you'll want to set up the System Monitor display. Keep System Monitor's statistics visible while you work so you get to know what's normal for your PC and your work habits. The easiest way to do that is to run System Monitor in a small, easy-to-read window that is unlikely to interfere with other computing tasks.
To get your System Monitor window to look like the one shown in Figure 2, open the System Monitor's View menu and check the Numeric Charts setting. Line and bar charts are colorful and fun to look at, but a numeric chart is more precise and easier to read. Also check the Always on Top and Hide Title Bar settings.
Finally, resize the System Monitor window as desired, and place it on the edge of your screen where it's out of the way. You can make it quite small if you're willing to forgo identification labels and to use color to identify each statistic's box.
Behind the Numbers
Far more statistics are available for viewing than you would ever want to put on a single screen. Most of them are too technical for the average user. (Alas, the explanations offered by the Explain button on the Add Item screen are a joke.) But a handful of statistics are useful to just about every PC user.
Kernel: Processor Usage (%). This is an excellent indicator of your PC's overall computing burden. If your CPU usage consistently runs at over 75 percent, you're overtaxing your PC. The underlying cause may be insufficient memory, too many programs running at once, or a corrupt program that won't release the CPU. In some cases adding memory will fix the problem (see below). In others you need to get a more powerful system.
If you're stuck with high CPU usage--say, because you have an older PC that uses newer, more demanding software--make sure your CPU fan and power supply fan work properly, and confirm that air flows through the case without obstruction. A CPU that is heavily burdened runs hot, and without proper cooling the chip can fail.
Kernel: Threads. Active threads are small pieces of software that occupy RAM. The right number of threads for your PC depends on the software you happen to be running. My nonnetworked desktop system usually has 50 to 70 active threads when Windows 98 is running with no other applications open.
Once you have a feel for what's normal for your PC, keep an eye out for sudden changes. A program that increases the number of threads when open but does not release those threads when closed may be eating up your memory--a phenomenon called a memory leak.
Memory leaks were common under Windows 3.X, and the only fix was to restart your system. Leaks are much more infrequent in Windows 9x, but they still occur, most often with older 16-bit applications. In Windows 9x, you can usually release stranded threads by closing the offending application.
If a newer 32-bit program (one written for Windows 9x) continually eats up memory and leaves stranded threads, the source of trouble may very well be a corrupted file. If this is the case, you need to reinstall the application.
Memory Manager: Unused physical memory.As you'd expect, this is the amount of physical RAM that's still free for use. You may be surprised at how little RAM remains available under Windows, even when only a few applications are running. This is because Windows constantly moves data in and out of the swap file on the hard disk. The 'Unused physical memory' setting is most useful when viewed in conjunction with the following six memory statistics.
Memory Manager: Swapfile size. Windows uses a swap file (also called virtual memory) as a temporary holding area for RAM data not currently being used. This allows Windows to run more programs concurrently than would fit in the installed physical memory alone.
Swap-file size is the size of the file created by Windows on the hard disk. If your system has a limited amount of hard-disk space, you can use this statistic to balance your hard-disk storage needs against Windows' memory needs.
Memory Manager: Swapfile in use. This statistic indicates the amount of RAM data that is actually stored in the swap file at any given moment.
Memory Manager: Page faults, Page-outs. If either of these two statistics jumps to higher-than-normal levels, Windows may be relying too heavily on the swap file. If the increase coincides with sluggish performance, you need to add more physical RAM to your system.
Memory Manager: Allocated memory. This identifies the total amount of data that Windows is manipulating in memory. To determine exactly how much RAM a given program requires, subtract the "Memory Manager: Disk cache size" value from the amount of "Allocated memory", with and without the program running. The difference is the amount of RAM used by that program.
Memory Manager: Locked memory. Locked memory refers to the amount of data that must remain in physical RAM and can't be swapped to the hard disk. If an application forces a high percentage of data to be locked in physical RAM, other applications' performance can slow because an inordinate amount of data must be shuttled on and off the hard disk.
Memory Manager: Disk cache size. This statistic reports the amount of RAM allocated to caching hard-disk data. On systems running the original version of Windows 95 with the FAT16 file system, you may be able to rescue a few megabytes of RAM by lowering this setting.
Watch your disk cache values to determine your system's maximum cache needs. If you see more than a megabyte of difference between what your disk cache uses and its fixed maximum value--which is determined by the MaxFileCache= setting listed under [vcache] in your system.Ini file--you can recover some of the wasted RAM by lowering the MaxFileCache= setting. Of course,the memory you save may not be worth the effort if your system has more than 32MB of RAM. But if you're working with 32MB of memory or less, your applications will benefit from the extra RAM.
Dial-Up Adapter: Bytes Received/Second. This is a handy indicator for checking your dial-up connection speed. System Monitor also maintains a Bytes Transmitted/Second statistic.
Kirk Steers is a PC World contributing editor. Hardware Tips welcomes your tips and questions and pays $50 for published items.
Blank Is Better
I frequently leave my desk for several minutes to several hours each day with my PC and monitor running. I've been told that I should use a screen-saver program to prolong the life of my monitor. Should I?
Alan Halprin, Chicago
Probably not. In the Early Jurassic period of computing, when monochrome monitors dominated the desktop landscape, screen savers were a necessary piece of software. Leaving those monitors on and displaying a single image for extended periods could burn that image into the monitor's screen. The phosphorus in today's color monitors is much less susceptible to burn, however, so today's screen savers serve primarily as a source of entertainment and a handy way to automatically password-protect your PC when you leave your desk for long periods.
In fact, using a screen saver can actually shorten your monitor's life. The first component likely to fail on color monitors is the electron gun that guides its illuminating beam. The best way to prolong the gun's life is to shut down your monitor when it's not in use. And if you can't be bothered to manually shut down your monitor each time you leave your desk, let Windows 98 do it for you.
Open Control Panel's Power Management applet and click the Power Schemes tab. Even if you use the "Always On" power scheme, you can set your monitor to shut down automatically after a set time. Any keystroke will reactivate it immediately.
Hey, Modem! Shaddup Already!
Want to silence your squeaky modem? No problem. In Control Panel, double-click Modems, highlight your modem, and select Properties. Under the General tab, you'll find a "Speaker volume" control. Unfortunately, not all modems support this feature. If yours doesn't, go to the Connection tab and click the Advanced button. In the Extra settings text box, enter the string ATM0 (that last character is a zero, not the letter o). Close the open dialog boxes, and you'll never have to listen to that digital cacophony again.