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Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Take advantage of tools to monitor memory usage in Windows 7

Ever since I discovered how to use the Windows 9x’s Resource Meter to keep track of system resources and prevent system crashes caused by depleting system resources when running more than one application at a time, I’ve made good use of Windows monitoring tools.

Over the years Microsoft has vastly improved the primitive Resource Meter and increasingly made it easier to see what is going on with the operating system’s use of memory. With Windows 7, I’ve discovered some slight, but notable, changes in the way that memory usage is reported on the Performance tab of the Task Manager. I have also noticed a very nice chart in the new Resource Monitor that provides very detailed information on physical memory usage at a glance.

In this issue of the Windows Vista and Windows 7 Report, I’ll take a closer look at the changes on Task Manager’s Performance tab and investigate the Physical Memory usage chart.