Best tool to monitor a computer performances ?
Posted by Miriakus@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 17 comments
Hi, I have a question about the best way to monitor the performances of an user’s computer because he’s complaining about lags.
Context :
I have a small issue with a VP complaining about his computer being slow.
His computer was changed 4 months ago, it’s a Dell Pro Premium with ultra 7 268V, 32gb ram, 1To SSD and Win11 pro.
His needs are moderate Office use and web browsing. I brought this computer because he’s prompt to complain so I thought I would not hear from him about perf issue until a long time with such an oversized computer for his needs.
Turns out, he’s complaining about the computer being slow. 2 weeks ago, it was Linkedin being slow. I checked and indeed Linkedin was slow but it was on their side, it was slow with other computers and other networks. Right now, he complains about Outlook. He reverted to Outlook classic because he doesn’t like the new Outlook. He doesn’t have issue while using the web client but he doesn’t like it either.
On a bright note, he does his updates, doesn’t keep a thousand tabs open and turn off his computer daily.
Anyway, I need to make sure the issue isn’t about the computer but rather some specific case that are outside my scope of action.
What’s the best way to monitor his computer performances continuously and check if there is no system or hardware issue ?
Thank you in advance for your recommandations.
RustyRoot8@reddit
I’ve been collecting diagnostics for Entra joined machines and running them through Claude. Tell him the symptoms and timeframe and it’s pretty accurate.
Teflon-Ron@reddit
"Tell him..." oh brother
anonymousITCoward@reddit
Weren't there movies warning about this sort of thing?
Liquidennis@reddit
The smartest move is not to play.
Valkeyere@reddit
Kobayashi Maru
Fairchild110@reddit
If you intune plan 2, look at the timeline. If you don’t have that, tell your company to invest into a product like Lakeside or Nexthink.
Additionally, those 238V/268V systems are only 8T. We have problems with any windows 11 deployment when our EDR/DLP and collaboration stack is sitting on top with any system that isn’t 12T+. We’ve really been digging the AMD Ryzen AI 350/370 Dell Pro Plus systems. Shame Dell isn’t putting AMD in any of their premium products anytime soon.
GroundbreakingCrow80@reddit
Yes the new Intel processors are bad. The ecores might work in benchmarks but users complain about performance in the real world.
Amd processors have heard no complaints for us is been out first time buying them for work because there are so many complaints about the Intel devices.
Fairchild110@reddit
Honestly, the P vs E cores are fine. It was meteor lake that introduced low power efficiency cores that really threw a wrench into our trust with Intel. No vendor really picked up support and it wasn’t really compatible with a lot of enterprise tools so it would break shit and cause big problems for us.
AdInevitable8483@reddit
Ask him to switch to linux to get performance
Liquidennis@reddit
The chip in these models is designed for power saving efficiency running at a low wattage. It’s also not designed for multi-threading. Make sure that best performance is selected under power management, that may help a bit.
Smartman971@reddit
OP this is actually super important. It’s gonna be in best performance mode or is basically throttled the whole time. I’ve literally noticed a 2 ghz jump from efficiency to performance mode.
Miriakus@reddit (OP)
Never knew those chips would throttle that much without high perf selected, I will look into it !
SHANE523@reddit
Turns off his PC nightly? Are updates running when he is working?
PSEXEC in sysinternals could give you remote monitoring.
Powershell get-process -computername
Are you on the same network, are they working remotely?
swimsteve@reddit
Start with perfmon. It’s free, native to Windows and easy to setup.
You can set up a few performance counters that’ll actually help you figure out where things are bottlenecking—CPU, CPU frequency, memory, disk, and network are a good baseline.
Run it as a circular log so it keeps collecting data without blowing up your disk. That way when the issue happens, you’ve got history to look back on instead of guessing what went wrong.
All the user will have to do is provide a time frame of when the performance issue occurred.
vermyx@reddit
This is pretty easy to set up and parse. The only change I would add on here is that there is a registry setting so that the processes append their pid rather than an incremental number so that you can figure out what is going on process wise.
But first and foremost "what is slow and what is the expected behavior". Never accept "it's slow". This becomes a needle in a haystack. I had a tech waste three weeks chasing his tail on a slowness issue. He came to me and asked for help. I asked the client what the issue was. "It's slow". Whats slow? "The system." That doesn't help us - can you show me what you mean? There was one specific search that was slow because the index being used was inefficient for the data. Never leave slowness issues as just that.
canadian_sysadmin@reddit
Just about any monitoring app you could have install an agent on a computer.
You could also literally sit in this person's office for a couple days to monitor. Literally set up camp and work in there. The second they complain - you can see what's going on. I've had to do this with a handful of users over the years.
I've also had one or two users over the years - they're cursed. We'd buy them the most comically over-spec'd system - things would still "be slow". It went so far as one user literally complaining to the CEO, and claiming their home gaming computer was better, fine, we let them build their own computer. Still slow.
Subject-Middle-2824@reddit
ControlUP or NextThink