Specifications

Vista and the Reliability &
Performance Monitor
By Vinny LaBash, a member and regular columnist
of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.,
Florida
vlabash(at)comcast.net
www.spcug.org
Anyone who has spent time trying to understand
the Windows XP Performance Monitor is going to
love Vista’s Reliability & Performance Monitor. No
more will you have to gure out what the various
performance procedures are really measuring. All the
confusion has been eliminated and a well designed
screen utility makes everything vastly simplied.
Every time you run a program on your system,
performance is affected in some way. The new
Vista Performance Monitor allows you to track these
operations on a real-time basis or to collect data for
analysis at a later time. The utility does this by taking
conguration information, performance counters,
data specic to program events, and then merging
everything into Data Collection sets. Microsoft has
pregured all the important details into a completely
revised utility that is not only easy to use, but easy to
understand. This new utility provides you with a set
of precongured elements that you can use to monitor
the reliability of your system. This article will give
you a detailed overview of the Reliability Monitor,
and show how to use its System Stability Chart to
track how your system behaves.
Here’s how to get to the Reliability and Performance
Monitor:
Left-click the orb at the left side of the task 1.
bar.
Right-click the 2. Computer button.
Select 3. Manage from the popup menu.
An alternate selection method is to right-click the
orb and type reliability in the Start Search text box.
Either way the Computer Management dialog box
will appear.
Expand the Reliability and Performance branch
and the Monitoring Tools branch by clicking on the
arrows adjacent to their icons. (See illustration)
Click the Reliability Monitor icon and it will appear
in the center pane. Click both Show/Hide Console
Tree and the Show/Hide Action Pane buttons to ll
the screen with the Reliability Monitor.
To
get the best perspective, maximize the window.
Dragging the scroll bar all the way to the left brings
the Reliability Monitor back to the beginning of time,
that is, to when Vista was installed.
The line diagram in the upper part of the window is
the main feature of the utility. This line is called the
stability index. Vista starts out with a reliability rating
of 10 which is the best you can hope for. Scroll back
to the right as far as you can go, and you will see your
current rating.
Drag the scroll bar slider back and forth, and you
will see the day-to-day ow of the Stability Index as
various events play themselves out.
Notice that the middle portion of the window is
sprinkled with icons divided into labeled rows. Let’s
see what they are telling us:
Software (Un)Installs: The yellow triangle with
question marks and the circles with lower case “i”s
show the date or dates when:
● an application was either installed or uninstalled.
● a driver or driver update was installed.
● virus denitions were updated.
Those are the major examples. This can be very
useful information when trying to troubleshoot a
problem.