The Performance tab is used as a quick graphical means of looking at the most important parts of the system. The graphical displays for CPU utilization closely resemble Performance Monitor’s System Monitor. You do not have the ability to add objects and counters, but then again, you do not have to worry about associated system overhead either, since the Performance tab is always available. The Performance tab can be used as a constant display that will help you identify problems as they occur, such as memory leaks, or high CPU or pagefile usage.

New to Windows XP is the Networking tab will display network utilization for all installed network cards. Between this and the Performance tab, you can easily and quickly draw any correlations between network usage and CPU utilization. Although you cannot draw any hard-and-fast conclusions as to what a problem is, this is definitely the quick way to determine if the network is slow.

Tags: xp task manager, system monitor, networking tab, pagefile usage