This time I turn to the Windows experts, those who know how to move deep in the system and have fun discovering the most particular tricks that can be of little use to some, but be a real revelation for others. Windows 7 has some more hidden features than you think and one of them is ResMon resource monitoring which offers an enhanced task manager able to reveal precisely what is happening on the computer.
The Windows Resource Monitor (ResMon) of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 provides a quick and easy way to solve problems related to unresponsive programs, system freezes and slow loads.
READ ALSO: How to check system resources on Windows PC in real time
On a PC with Windows 7, to start monitoring resources, you need to go to the Start menu and, in the search box, write resmon .
Resource monitoring is different from the Performance Monitor which is launched instead with the perfmon command.
Perfmon is a data collection while ResMon is more useful for analyzing problems, in real time, of the computer and programs.
The resource monitor contains four main tabs: CPU, memory, disk and network as well as an introductory tab called Overview.
Each of these tabs is also displayed in a graphical frame and, of course, the interface is intuitive as normal on Windows, with the possibility of maximizing and moving the window.
In Windows 7, 8 and 10 the best part of resource monitoring is the ability to filter specific processes and view their CPU and memory usage on the computer.
From the CPU tab you can view check boxes next to each name and just select the ones you are interested in checking.
The selected processes are displayed, with real-time resource monitoring, in the graph with an orange line.
Controlling resources from Resmon allows you to find bottlenecks and heavier programs more clearly than the Task Manager.
If the computer is slower than expected, you can start with the memory check : if the free memory is less than 50 MB, then there is a problem of some process too expensive.
If the CPU usage is consistently high, say more than 80%, it is easy to locate the responsible process and terminate it.
By right-clicking on one of the items in the list, you can also see the waiting chain, that is, on which other process the selected one is dependent.
From resource monitoring processes can also be suspended without terminating them.
On the CPU tab there is also the section relating to services which, therefore, can be stopped if any of them occupy too many resources.
In this regard, I remember the tools for the analysis of svchost.exe, a process linked to multiple services.
From the network card you can see exactly what is taking up more bandwidth.
If you are using an internal computer network and the Internet connection was slower than usual, it is better to check the use of the network by Resmon also on the other computers because the bandwidth totally occupied is a summation of all the connected PCs.
To add a shortcut to Resource Monitor on the desktop, you can create a new shortcut by putting as path: % windir% \ system32 \ resmon.exe
You can optimize the use of resources and avoid slowdowns on Windows by changing the priority of processes, balancing them .
If you want to try alternative enhanced task managers, there are many useful support programs that you can use to monitor Windows 7 resources.
