There is an better alternative to monitor the performance of your system than the task-manager, the alternative is the performance monitor(perfmon) . It lets you monitor hundreds of different critical system performance statistics and by knowing their threshold values and comparing them with the peak or average values that you are getting, you can diagnose and fix the problem.

How to use this tool ?

  • Open the command prompt and type perfmon or Open the run prompt(winkey+r) and type perfmon.msc.

  • One can then choose from two different views from the top panel i.e view graph or view histogram.

  • Extra parameters to be monitored can be added using the + icon from the top panel.You then have to choose the performance object that you want to monitor and then choose the counter that you want to monitor(as shown in the following figure).










  • To know about the counters that you want to monitor you can always select a counter and press the explain button.

  • To know more about the threshold values of the key counters and the performance object that you are monitoring, click on the help file icon the top panel, choose performance logs and alerts then click on checklist:monitoring performance. After going through the previous help checklist you will have sufficient knowledge on how to use this tool and the help file also provides you with key threshold values of some parameters, for example pages/sec must not exceed 20, if that is happening on an average basis then you might be suffering from low main memory problems but that cannot be concluded as it is affected by other parameters also.

  • You can always search Microsoft support for the counters you want to monitor and know more about them. The Microsoft support has excellent knowledge base articles that most people refer to.
Note:This tool by default gets its data from system registry, to get the data directly from Windows Management Interface you can append the /sysmon_wmi flag. Type perfmon /sysmon_wmi in the command prompt.