I now and then hear some rants about computers having bad performance. I asked some people why is it they would say so. The reply was “I could not work, the internet is so slow.”, “Takes ages for my computer to boot.”, “I opened a document it suddenly freezed.”, “The video when played goes slow motion.”, etc., etc..

I could safely say that the measure of performance is based on the speed at which a user gets the response expected. There is this relationship of performance and execution time. The lesser the response time the better the performance and the better the performance the lesser the execution time. But the latter is not always the case.

At work what happens when people encounter this? Users request for an upgrade to a newer and better hardware with little consideration on whether it’s necessary or not.
The argument could be that, well the office have money, why be left behind in technology? Sounds familiar?

At home we usually don’t enjoy the same luxury though objects becomes sentimentally valuable as time goes. Anyway, before spending big bucks on newer hardware like high-end processors it would be wise to determine if the processor’s benefit is worth it. This needs some monitoring of the system’s processor usage. Same goes with RAM, disk storage, etc..

There are lot’s of tools available to choose on but the point is consider computer performance before upgrading. I’ll talk more about measuring performance in the future.