User Guide

Using Student Survival Kit
22 Student Survival Kit
You can choose to have one, two, or more gauges to be active at any one
time—with each gauge reporting on the status of your system. The more
advancedyou are,orthemoredemanding yourprojects,themoregaugesyou
may want to keep active to monitor particular aspects of your computer and
applications.
By using WinGauge, and by customizing the gauges to your own specific
needs, you will be warned about potential problems in time to take the
necessary preventative steps.
WinGauge alerts you so that you can save your data, close programs, or take
other actions to prevent your system from slowing down, crashing, or
locking-up. As an added bonus, you can also drag application icons and
folders into WinGauge so that the program becomes your one-stop system
monitoring and application launch pad.
The Most Important Gauges
The following list summarizes the most important gauges to have active:
• Highest Resources–The Highest Resources gauge measures “system
resources”—small,criticalmemoryregionsinWindowsitself.Whenanyof
these regions fill up, your system may crash. You can increase your
resources by closing some applications.
• Virtual Memory–The VirtualMemory gauge measures how much of your
diskswapfileisinuse.Themoreofyourswapfileyouuse,thesloweryour
system will run. If your swap file fills up, your system may crash.
• If you find that your virtual memory is frequently high, you should
consider buying and installing more RAM and making more room
available on your Windows drive.
• Swap File Requests–The Swap File Requests gauge measures how often
Windows is accessing the swap file. The more frequently Windows
accesses, the less efficient your overall system.
• Drive Space–The Drive Space gauge measures the amount of room lefton
your drives.If a diskfills up while a programis running, your system may
crash.
Working With Gauges
In WinGauge, you can set global gauge commands or set specific commands
foreachgauge.Youcanalsoadd,update,orremovegauges.
NOTE: For step-by-step instructions and more information on how to
use WinGauge, refer to theMcAfee StudentSurvival Kitonline Help file.