May 06, 2008

Vista PCs: the hardware resources they are so hungry for

Cross-tabular analysis. It's one of those nerdy-sounding terms that statisticians like to use when expounding upon their latest data-mining gems. It's also the lifeblood of the Windows Sentinel project. We use cross-tabular analysis to extract all sorts of interesting statistics from the exo.repository, including how a platform shift can directly affect workload composition. [ Add your Windows systems to the exo.performance community, plus monitor how they specifically perform, with InfoWorld's Windows Sentinel tool. ] For example, did you know that Vista-based PCs are working harder than ever? Aside from the obvious fact that they run slower than they did under... more

TAGS: Windows Sentinel, Windows deskop

April 18, 2008

Application usage summary: 4/18/07

In the first of our ongoing series on "who's using what" under Windows, we focus on the state of the Task List on our cross-section of instrumented systems:   Figure 1 - Application Usage Based on our sampling of ~1500 Windows systems, here's what we found: Over 80% of you fire-up Internet Explorer from time to time. Whether it's to check an IE-specific web site or because you're using an application that incorporates some IE functionality, Microsoft's web browser shows up as one of the most common processes in the real world. Despite IE's near omnipresence we still find Firefox... more

TAGS: Windows deskop, Windows server

April 15, 2008

The place for real-world Windows performance data

Welcome to the Windows Sentinel blog. Here, you'll learn all about real-world Windows performance based on analysis of data and trends extracted from the exo.repository of Windows performance data. That repository contains aggregated data on more than 1,000 systems -- a number that will grow as people join the InfoWorld Windows Sentinel monitoring service. Monitor your Windows systems over the Web Windows Sentinel is a free performance monitoring and analysis service for Microsoft Windows-based systems. Delivered through a partnership between InfoWorld and Devil Mountain Software (the creators of the exo.performance.network), Windows Sentinel allows you to monitor system, process and network... more

TAGS: Windows Sentinel