System Monitor

You can start the System Monitor in Windows by entering perfmon in the Run box for Windows 2000 or Windows XP or the Search box for Windows Vista and Windows 7. Despite the name, this actually opens Performance Monitor, which is a tool you can use to gather performance data for your PC and display it either in real-time counters or in a log file. This tool lets you add various counters (such as LogicalDisk, Memory, and Processor) and then see a display of how these aspects of your computer are operating. This is a powerful diagnostic tool that enables you to analyze how the operating system uses hardware and system resources.