If you have taken a look at Windows Task Manager, and wondered what does all this mean. This brief guide should help you understand what these values represent.
The performance information is broken down into four categories:
CPU, Physical Memory, Kernel Memory, and System
CPU:
CPU (Central Processing Unit) usage represents the percentage of CPU capacity currently being used by Windows and all running applications. This number should be low (< 5%) when you are not actively using your computer.
Physical Memory:
Physical memory is commonly referred to as RAM (random access memory)
Total—The total physical RAM in your system (in MB.) Divide this number by 1,024 to get the number in gigabytes
Cached—Physical RAM set aside by Windows for cached documents and programs. Cached memory is used to speed up Windows and is the first to be used when available memory hits 0MB
Available—Memory available for immediate use (standby and free memory)
Free—Unused memory available for immediate use
Kernel Memory:
Kernel memory is memory dedicated to the operating system (Windows) and not applications.
Paged—Kernel memory which is mapped to pages of virtual memory (stored on your hard disk drive)
Nonpaged—Kernel memory which resides in physical memory
System:
Handles—A handle is a pointer to a system resource used by an application. If you want to find out what handles a process has open, you can either use Sysinternals Handle or Process Explorer
Threads—A thread is a processor task, executed by a process. Most processes use two or more threads to execute tasks
Processes—This is the total number of processes running, on your PC, by all users
Uptime—The number of days : hours : minutes : seconds you’ve been running your current session
Commit (GB)—The minimum and maximum size (in gigabytes) of your pagefile