An introduction to the Windows XP Task Manager: Processes, Programs, and Performance – Part 3
Posted on May 11, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Make sure to read other posts from the Windows Task Manager series!
- An introduction to the Windows XP Task Manager: Processes, Programs, and Performance – Part I
- An introduction to the Windows XP Task Manager: Processes, Programs, and Performance – Part 2
- An introduction to the Windows XP Task Manager: Processes, Programs, and Performance – Part 3
In this post we’re continuing on exploring the Windows Task Manager. We already looked at the Applications tab and the Processes tab, now we’ll go through the last two tabs: Performance and Networking.
The Performance tab is a little confusing with all kinds of monitors like Physical Memory, Commit Charge, and Kernel Memory. What the hell does all that mean? Well, let’s do the easy part first: CPU Usage. This is simply a graphical view of your current CPU usage, nothing special. You’ll see it spike here and there, especially if you open a program or something similar.
The next two graphs are referred to as “PF Usage” and “Page File Usage History”, but this is misleading because it doesn’t actually refer to the amount of your page file being used, but is the commit charge. So what is the commit charge? Well the Total Commit Charge is actually the current amount of RAM (physical memory) and virutal memory being used. It’s a combination of both! You’ll notice under physical memory, I have a total of 1GB and 344 MB are still avilable. But for the Total Commit Charge, the value is around 725 MB. This is because not all of the physical memory is being used, only about 650 MB and the rest is being taken from virutal memory (which is space on your hard drive, also known as the paging file).
The Limit number underneath commit charge is the total of all your virtual memory and physical memory combined. Kernel memory is simply memory that is assigned to the operating system and that no one else can use. The sum of Paged and Nonpagedd equals the total. Paged means that some of the kernel memory is using virtual memory (the page file) and the rest is using physical memory (the RAM).
So basically, if you take the amount of Available physical memory and subtract that from the Total physical memory, you’ll get the amount of physical memory currently being used. Then add the total kernel memory to that and you should get the value in the PF Usage window! Phewww! Make sense now??
There’s one more thing about this tab and that’s if you go to View and you’ll see an option called Show Kernel Times.
What this does is show you the percentage of the processor being used by the Windows Kernel or operating system. It’ll display red on top of some of the green part. So if half the bar is green and half is red, that means 50% of the current CPU Usage is the Kernel!
Ok, and now the last tab is the Networking tab. This tab is very useful if, say, your connection to the Internet is slow or you are copying files between computers and it’s taking forever. You can go to the Networking tab and if you see that your Local Area Connection is at 90% utilization, then you might have some kind of virus or spyware that’s eating up all your bandwidth.
The Networking tab is fairly easy to understand: You have a graph for each type of network adapter on your computer (Ethernet adapter on your computer, wireless adapter, and Bluetooth if your computer has that. At the bottom you get some basic informatiom such as the adapter name, the network utilization, maximum link speed and current state.
As you can see only my wireless connection is working (operational) and my utilization is close to 0. This should for the most part be very low unless you are transferring or downloading large video or audio files. And you can tell the maximum speed for each adapter!
One last thing about this tab is again if you go to View and choose Select Columns…, you can pick a whole bunch of other stats too!
And that’s about it! Hope this was informative for someone!
[tags]windows xp task manager, task manager, how to use windows task manager[/tags]
» Filed Under Windows XP
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- An introduction to the Windows XP Task Manager: Processes, Programs, and Performance – Part 2
- An introduction to the Windows XP Task Manager: Processes, Programs, and Performance – Part I
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Thanks man now I know what commit charge means!
Hi,
I would much appreciate if you can help me to understand this – Windows/XP CPU Usage. When I start an application (say X), I know there are many other applications running in the back ground. I do not start these background applications. These background applications are automatically started by windows and some of them are non essential and can be stopped if I wish to. After stopping all these non essential applications, why X is not taking higher percentage of CPU. Does it mean the other h/w (memory, hard disk, etc. ) is not allowing the cpu to work faster. I bought my computer specially for home video editing with the specification recommended by the sales person. Technical support is not giving any satisfactory answer.
Regards
Thiru
Thanks for the info, but they don’t seem to add up on my task manager like they do on yours. On mine, the total physical minus avail is about 400000, and when you add the kernel, that would come to 458000. But, my page file usage graph says 351 MB. So, the computation that you gave does not add up on my computer. I don’t really know if that means your description of what the graph means is wrong, or my computer is doing something funny. Maybe you could help.
Bruce: the commit charge is the page file + RAM that is what is displayed in the graph, also BIOS uses about 100mb of ram constantly and that 100mb is not even recognized by task manager.
Thiru, that is normal for some programs to not use a lot of cpu, when you start a program it will take more then when it it open and sitting in memory.
hi all. i have question about task manager , in process tab when you right click on one of the tasks and go to the set periority there is A option that named realtime , i want to now what is it?
reza, realtime is just another priority higher then high so windows will process realtime processes before high. but i recommend you dont use realtime because windows gets glitchy with it sometimes