As I use Microsoft Vista more, I’m impressed by some common sense things that finally made it into the Operating System.  And don’t you try to tell me how to spell hienie.

One of the things that bugged me for a long time was that I had to use third party tools, like sysinternals, to view details on what was taking up disk time, network time, memory, etc.  Task Manager was “ok” but lacked the real troubleshooting information I needed when I wanted to optimize my system.  (side note: Microsoft bought sysinternals a while back).

A Unix machine has no such limitation.  On Unix, I could use top, vmstat, lofs, tcpdump and many other command line tools to hone in and find EXACTLY what was going on with the system.  In short, I was Mr. BadAss Admin.

Now, Microsoft gives us the Resource Monitor:

Like the Task Manager, it gives us eye candy for CPU usage, Network utilization and memory consumption.  It adds a cool graph for Disk Usage.

More importantly, however, it gives you expandable sections for Disk and Network so you can see exactly what process is using the hard drive or network card, and the details of that access.  What file is being throttled at a million miles per second?  Which app is trying to talk out my network and taking up a ton of resources?  Which ship can do the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs?

The collapsed summaries themselves give useful information

I can see current usage and recent peak events

Even cooler that that- you can sort the columns and try to navigate your way to finding the anomalies.

For example, you might find that the search indexer is making your system crawl.  Outlook could be messing with a fragmented OST file.  The password crack program might be beating up your disk trying to brute force Obama’s website /etc/passwd file that was emailed to you by the Hillary campaign.

You can also narrow down network activity - who is woopra talking to?  What servers does trillian connect to?

About the only complaints I have about the tools it that you can’t right-click a process and *do* stuff with it like you can in Task Manager.  I want to be able to right-click and change process priority.  Or kill the process.  Or view the threads.  Or start a network sniffer.  Or tell it to get me a Pepsi.

Another refreshing thing (haha, get it?  it refreshes!  so it’s refreshing! HAHAHAHAHAA) is that Vista is actually *honest* about it’s problems.  It has a thing called the “Reliability Monitor” and it tracks all sorts of badness about your machine.

YES!  It is actually advertising and tracking when failures happen!  On a timeline!  Woo-hoo!

How cool is that? I can see the dates when app failures happen, or actual windows failures, when I install or uninstalled software, and actually SEE WHEN THINGS STARTED GOING WRONG. 

Not only that, I can click on one of the red X’s and it will tell me which app crashed and the details

I applaud the Microsoft developers for putting this stuff in and making power users like me happier about the crashes that do happen.

I also can’t wait to smash the first Mac whore who says “the Mac had that in ‘84 and we didn’t even NEED a service pack and the smell of my own gas is pleasant to me.”