Explore additional tools
Microsoft also provides the following tools for improving performance:
Sysinternals
In addition to the built-in performance monitoring tools in Windows, you also can download and use the Sysinternals suite of tools. Sysinternals offers a number of advanced system utilities. You can use a number of the following tools to monitor performance some of which include:
- Contig. This tool enables you to defragment your frequently used files quickly.
- DiskMon. This tool enables the computer to capture all hard disk activity, and acts like a software disk activity light in the system tray.
- PageDefrag. This tool enables you to defragment your paging files and registry hives.
- Process Explorer. This tool enables you to determine which files, registry keys, and other objects processes have open, which DLLs they have loaded, and more. This tool also displays who owns each process.
- Process Monitor. This tool enables you to monitor file system, registry, process, thread, and dynamic-link library (DLL) activity in real time.
- Autoruns. Extensive scan of programs, drivers, scripts, and extensions that are configured to run during bootup, sign in or when certain Windows applications launch.
Note
Defragment utilities should not be used on solid-state drives (SSD).
Windows Performance Toolkit
Included in the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit, the Windows Performance Toolkit consists of performance monitoring tools that produce in-depth performance profiles of Windows operating systems and applications. It provides deep analysis of how applications and services are consuming resources.