optimize and monitor windows XP

January 3, 2007 4:39 AM

What is a good performance monitoring and optimizing program for windows xp?

I'd like to find an all-in-one performance tuning and monitoring program that shows internet speed, memory usage, programs running, disk IO rates, etc. and gives me a way to save this info for comparisons and change settings to optimize performance.

Perhaps the interface is configurable, so a front page of the most important things to me could be displayed in a clear way.

Doesn't have to be free, doesn't have to be very cheap, but of course that would be a bonus.

posted by StickyCarpet to computers & internet (10 comments total)

start->run->perfmon
posted by SirStan at 4:39 AM on January 3, 2007

I always thought System Mechanic is/was a pretty good app. It monitors and has applications to remedy things such as speed optimization, security, virus/popup/spyware, clutter/diskspace, etc.
posted by MarkLark at 5:10 AM on January 3, 2007

SirStan: The feature I would most like not provided by perfmon is a single console overview that would show as much as possible on one page with bar and meter indicators.
posted by StickyCarpet at 6:08 AM on January 3, 2007

You can monitor much and generate reports with Everest from Lavalys.
posted by juiceCake at 6:31 AM on January 3, 2007

No sysinternals stuff any use to you?
posted by chrissyboy at 6:50 AM on January 3, 2007

What about RainMeter?

Looks as though it may not be supported anymore though.
posted by monkeyforest at 7:00 AM on January 3, 2007

Anyone else with this question can also consider Sandra by sysopt that I have just been informed of by a person actually in this room.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:54 AM on January 3, 2007

I tried several packages to optimize my system (XP).

Most important of all is, how much 'crap' runs in the background and eats ressources. So with a startup manager you can look and check what's all started with your system.

Try to keep it clean and mean.

TuneUp Utilities have a pretty neat collection of tools to speed up systems, optimize the registry and do some house cleaning.

http://www.tune-up.com/products/tuneup-utilities/

Overall don't expect too much of these tools - unless you have installed tons of software over the years.

The best way to speed up XP is still a clean install every year - or buy a faster computer ...
posted by homodigitalis at 10:37 AM on January 3, 2007

Get familiar with Samurize. You can customize it to display pretty much anything you can think of right on your desktop. If the default options aren't what you need, there are plugins for a whole slew of other tools/services.

There are tons of premade scripts and templates available on the site, but you will likely need to tweak some of the values to get it to work perfectly.

I think it's more fun and more useful to design your own custom script, but it can be time consuming. Or not, depends on what you want out of it.

Oh, and it's free.
posted by T.D. Strange at 1:07 PM on January 3, 2007

Gotta say: If you're looking to improve performance on XP, check out the guide at TweakGuides.com. I think that tuning XP for optimium performance is made relatively simple with this guide.
posted by joecacti at 12:43 PM on January 5, 2007