I have been exploring and tweaking Windows 7 and trying out all the “hacks” and “tweaks” I can find in order to get the best performance from my machine. This morning I found a new gem I didn’t know existed. This may have existed on Vista but since I never used Vista, I have no idea. Its called the resource monitor and it like the task manger on steroids.
Click Start, type RESMON and press Enter to launch the Resource Monitor, then click the CPU, Memory, Disk or Network tabs. Windows 7 will immediately show which processes are hogging the most system resources. This utility gives the user a much more detailed view of whats happening on the system. Here is a quick screen shot of what mine looks like:
If a program has locked up, then you can right-click its name in the list and select Analyze Process. Windows will then try to tell you why it’s hanging . The program might be waiting for another process or some other reason which could lead you to fix the problem.
I loved this utility so much I went ahead and pined it to my task bar. To pin anything to your task bar in windows 7 , simply open the program as you would normally and the navigate down to its icon on the taskbar and right click. You will be presented with a dialog which allows you to pin the program to the taskbar. From then on you can just quick launch the resmon.exe form the taskbar.
