Exploring Windows’ Administrative Tools: Part 2

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	TOP STORY Exploring Windows’ Administrative Tools: Part 2
	By Fred Langa Windows’ Performance Monitor is the key to understanding the details of your PC’s operation. This tool (built into XP, Vista, and Win7) lets you see, in real time and in collected data logs, how your PC reacts as different programs run — or fail to run!

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That’s the friendly message I get when I try to “Start Monitoring” in the ResMon application. :huh:

I’m using Windows 7.

I tried launching Perfmon ‘as administrator’ but still no dice.

Any ideas??

TIA for replies.

~Wheezer

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This article was really timely! I’ve been having intermittent problems with Word 2007 opening on my Dell Inspiron 580S (Win 64, 6GB ram) for a few months. I don’t use the program regularly, but perhaps 50-75% of the time when I try to start Word for the first time in a given day, it hangs. I used to try to then open in the Word safemode, but that wouldn’t respond. I learned that the only solution was to do Repair on Office 2007 via Control Panel. After a reboot, Word was fine. Lately it seems the hanging occurs more frequently, but that may just be a matter of perception as I try to check more often to see if everything is working. When the problem happened this morning, I pulled out my print-out of the ResMon article and looked at the Processes. I right-clicked Winword.exe and then chose the Analyze Wait Chain. Nothing appeared in red, but I did note the dependency, splwow64.exe. I ended that process and Word came up! This still leaves me puzzled, of course. I’ve never had any printer errors within Word, and the splwow64 process seems related solely to that function. I went through the update driver wizard in the event that my Canon MG 5200 series driver was responsible. I’m not sure if a newer driver was installed or if the older one was merely reinstalled. Right now everything is fine, but only time will tell if Word will refuse to open again in a day or two. If that’s the case, I may go to Open Office, but I’m nagged by the thought the problem might follow me to the new program!

Any how, thanks for the article! If you have any further suggestions for my particular difficulty, I’d welcome them.

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I’ve used this robust monitoring program called Taskinfo for like forever:
http://www.iarsn.com/taskinfo.html

It runs in my tray all the time. It has never caused any problems. It just runs and is available whenever I want to check out performance info.

I recently noticed that it has now become “Free for personal non-commercial use”.

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