NT 1110
Unit 8
System Performance When addressing system performance an element that is often overlooked is disk fragmentation, even on a brand new system with plenty of RAM and a high end processor the performance of the hard disk may be a bottleneck causing performance issues. When you format a hard disk the process divides the disk into sectors, the file system groups the sectors into clusters which is the smallest unit of space available for holding a single file or part of a file. If you save a file on a freshly formatted disk the information would be written in contiguous clusters and since the clusters of the file are physically adjacent to each other the components of the hard disk work very efficiently pulling the data in one operation. The problem is hard disks do not stay organized very long. When you add data to an existing file the file system has to allocate more clusters for storage and typically these clusters end up in a different location on the disk. As files are deleted it creates gaps in the arrangement of the contiguously stored files and as you save new files the file system uses up all of these bits of free space resulting in new files being scattered all over the disk in noncontiguous pieces which results in performance issues because the disk heads have to spend more time moving from cluster to cluster before they can read or write data. Process load and the number of running process affect system performance because each process running requires system memory and if there’s a lot of processes running then they’re in turn consuming a lot of memory slowing down system performance. Each process also sends an interrupt to the CPU which causes the CPU to suspend other executions long enough to deal with the interrupts and user input. These things affect system performance because the operating system must arrange the execution of applications so that you believe there are several things happening at once which is complicated because the CPU can only do one thing at a time. Windows uses virtual memory when it doesn’t have enough regular physical memory to perform a task. When it does this it uses your hard drive to store information that would normally be put into your RAM. Therefore if you were to add more motherboard RAM, your system would not have to use as much virtual memory which would enhance the performance of your systems virtual memory. There are many factors that can affect the performance of a Windows computer system including the ones listed above but some other ways you could improve the performance of the system would be get rid of malware, it can get into your system a ton of different ways and it sets in the background slowing down your system. Some other ways would be upgrade your video card, get a faster drive, address hardware and driver issues you may have, try a different browser, remove junk off your system and check network connectivity.