PC Wizard 2008 is a freeware utility that provides detailed system information in a clearly presented way. Furthermore, it comes with a couple of system benchmarking tools that enable you to measure the performance of several hardware components.

The Outlook-like user interface makes it easy to access all the integrated tools fast. There are five sections: Hardware, Configuration, System Files, Resources, and Benchmark.

The Hardware section has 13 tools: System Summary, Mainboard, Processor, Video, IO Ports, Drives, Printers, Devices, Multimedia Network, Power Status, Voltage/Temperature/Fans, and Windows Hardware Experience Index. Some of the information provided by these tools can also be accessed with the onboard Windows System Info tool, but PC Wizard 2008 presents them in a nicer way and also offers more details.

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Low responsiveness is the most common reason why people think that their computer is slow. Usually they blame the operating system, and in particular Vista. However, assuming that the hardware is as modern as the operating system, the real culprit is usually an application that had gone mad. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the program has crashed and is in an endless loop that is consuming all of your processor power. Some applications just misbehave by pushing other programs aside, claiming most of the resources for themselves. Sometimes it can take several seconds for a program that has already been loaded to respond to a mouse click.

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Do you think that Windows Vista is too fast? Then Cpukiller 3 is the solution to your problem. It helps you to slow down your Windows machine easily. You think, I am kidding? Not really. There are indeed situations when you require artificial processor load.

One typical scenario is that you want to test an application that only shows certain problems if the CPU is under stress. Another typical problem is running a legacy application on a modern computer. Sometimes the old application will run so fast that you are not able to interact with it. Recently, I had such a problem with a new application. I used VMware Workstation on a powerful server, and I wasn’t able to access the BIOS setup of a virtual machine because the “press F2” message was only displayed for a fraction of a second.

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You probably know that you can set the CPU affinity with Task Manager (right click on a process). This comes in handy, as sometimes it is useful to run a certain program just on one processor core. I usually do this if I have an app that runs amok and utilizes all my CPU resources. Restricting this program to one CPU core gives me back some processor power. You can also decrease the CPU priority, but in my experience, this doesn’t always help.

Since quad core CPUs are becoming common, even on desktop computers, there are more options for making use of processor affinity. For example, you could reserve some of your CPU cores for an application that needs more resources. Virtualization solutions are typical candidates for this. Unfortunately, managing processor affinity with Task Manager is a bit cumbersome. That’s where Edgemeal Get and Set CPU Affinity comes in.

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Today, I can just quote Kennedy because he expressed the essence of his stance in just two sentences:

Windows Vista is a bloated pig of an operating system. In fact, compared to Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or 3, Vista requires roughly twice the hardware resources to deliver comparable performance.

He knows what he is talking about, because he ran numerous performance tests. I have been discussing some comparable performance tests before, and I don’t want to go into this again, since I think that they are rather pointless.

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I already discussed the Vista x64 vs. Vista x86 question a year ago. Vista was just released and for the early adopters, the first decision to be made was which edition, i.e. 32-bit or 64-bit, would be the better choice. At this time, I was skeptical regarding Vista x64, mostly because the advantages didn’t outweigh the downsides. It is time now to reconsider this question since the main disadvantages of the 64-bit version (hardware and software compatibility) might not be such an issue anymore.

I was planning to do some research already for some time, but fortunately the German print magazine C’t (8/2008) just published a couple of comprehensive reports about this topic. So I will summarize some of their findings garnished with my own views. Today, I will focus on performance and in my next posts in this series, I will discuss software compatibility and hardware compatibility.

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Iometer is a free Open Source tool to test disk performance. Among others, you can measure the I/O transfer rate and the average I/O response time. Its first version was released 10 years ago for Windows NT. But it is still a useful tool because it also works under Windows XP/2003 and even with Vista and Windows Sever 2008. Iometer supports many different settings. In this post, I will just show you how to get started with this nifty free disk measurement utility. If you like it, you should consult its manual for further instructions.

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Network monitoring is certainly an essential part of any system administrator’s work. However, from my experience, it is often neglected. If your boss calls you because he can’t access his emails, it is already too late then. There are so many different monitoring tools out there that I find it very difficult to choose. There are various approaches to network monitoring. To a certain degree it is a matter of taste, but it also depends on your environment and on your work style to consider which tool suits best for you. I had a closer look at PacketTrap’s new version 2.0 of pt360 PRO. I was wondering before what “360” stands for. It became clear after a few minutes when I tried the tool.

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The German print magazine C’t (5/2008, p. 62) compared the performance of Vista SP1 with Vista RTM. There are quite a few performance tests about Vista SP1 these days, but those from C’t are always worth mentioning because they are known to have a lot of experience with such technical tests.

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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes from ZDnet ran a comprehensive performance test comparing Windows Vista SP1 with Windows XP SP2. He only tested file copy related tasks, though. Now, guess which OS is faster? Good guess! Anyway, it is interesting to see the exact difference because it allows you to estimate in what way a move to Vista might affect performance. However, in one sense all these performance tests are pointless.

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Robert McLaws ran a performance test with the refresh of Vista SP1 RC which I blogged about yesterday. He compared the performance with a patched Vista RTM using PCMark Vantage. This benchmarking program leverages specific Windows features such as Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Media Player, etc.). McLaws ran this benchmark on systems with Vista x86 and Vista x64. The results are quite interesting.

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Did it ever happen to you that your computer was unbelievably slow because your hard disk was so busy? I am sure it did. Sometimes you know the culprit keeping the light of your disk drive blinking like wild. But most of the time you probably wonder what the heck could have a higher priority for Windows other than loading the application you just launched.

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Some days ago I blogged about a questionable performance test of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. The same organizations just tested the performance of Windows XP SP3. The “Researchers” wrote that they measured a “performance boost” of, well, 10%.

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The exo.performance.network tested Vista with the beta of service pack 1. Many organizations are waiting for SP1 in the hope that it will solve all the problems they had with Vista. One issue that is often discussed in this context is performance. To come straight to the point: According to their test result Vista SP1 is not faster than Vista RTM.

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Iperf is an easy-to-use free command line tool that allows you to measure your network bandwidth by generating artificial traffic. Such a tool can be useful if you want to test whether the network speed is fast enough for a certain application or not. You can also use it to troubleshoot network related problems.

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