Today my friend Jeff hit me up with an interesting question. His quad-core HP DL585 is supposed to operate at 3.4 GHz, but Performance Monitor was showing it running at 82% of the maximum frequency–2.8 GHz.

My first thought was that the difference was the metric AMD uses to make it easier to compare their processors to Intels higher-frequency chips–and I was really wrong. When I investigated the Performance Monitor counters Jeff was looking at, I discovered a counter I hadn’t used before: Processor Performance\% of Maximum Frequency, as shown above.

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A quick question from a reader:

I’m running Vista 32-bit and would like to know which programs are the only ones absolutely required for startup. Thanks.

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Over at the Official Google Webmaster Blog, Matt warns that Google might (someday) factor in page load times when returning search results. In other words, if your website is slow, it might fall off the search rankings.

He pointed me to a site I hadn’t seen before–webpagetest.org. It’s fantastic. I’ve used many different website optimization tools (including Web Page Analyzer, Google Webmaster Tools, and Page Speed), but WebPageTest provides several different sources throughout the world, and different bandwidths, with different browser versions, and a fantastic user interface.

I used it to examine the performance of two of my sites–www.vistaclues.com and www.northrup.org. Northrup.org was pretty good already because I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing it, but I did discover that simultaneous connections with older browsers was limiting the page load time a bit (despite the fact that I already use parallelization), so I juggled the locations of images around a bit.

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That’s a screenshot from my favorite free tool for testing hard disk performance–HD Tune (there’s a pro version you can buy, too). That’s from my Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 1.5 TB SATA drive backup drive.

The Blue Line–Transfer Rate

First, the blue line is the transfer rate. That’s the speed which the hard disk sends data to the computer when a big file is lined up nicely–defragmented, in other words. Notice that the line starts high (at 126 MB/sec) and drops (to about 57 MB/sec). That’s because the test moves from the outside of the drive to the inside. Disk drives are round, like a record, and so the outside spins faster (in inches/sec) from the inside.

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Question:

Hi.. I’m just wondering if its possible to disable some services to make vista run like xp or make it like xp. Im having problems playing games. The game runs in slow motion. It runs way faster in XP.

Answer:

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Question:

Can you comment on if the new system of using CF cards as a memory boost really increases Windows Vista performance.  I think they call it ready boost.  I have tried it on a new Dell Quad Core system with an internal card reader and there does not seem to be any benifet at all.  The card I am using is an 8 gb 120x speed Transcend CF card.  Was this just a marketing scam on Microsoft’s part ?   I also have the 4 gb memory frustration that everybody else seems to have.  My system shows 3 gb installed.

Thanks,

Ed

Answer:

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Your computer is bogged down, so you open Task Manager and check the processes tab. There’s the culprit: Svchost.exe. Svchost.exe represents many different services, however, so it doesn’t really tell you what’s causing the problem.

In Windows Vista, you can easily determ determine which specific service is using resources. Just follow these steps:

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