Hands on: Third-party themes

The top item in the left pane - Reliability and Performance - shows a Resource Overview, with separate graphs for CPU, disk, network and memory activity, and expanding the bars below reveals a per-program breakdown of this activity.

Don’t be alarmed at the ‘Hard Faults’ entries under memory; this doesn’t mean you have anything wrong with your Ram. A ‘Hard Fault’ - also known as a ‘Page Fault’ - means that a page of memory referenced by Windows or an application is no longer in memory, but has been swapped out to the paging file instead.

The Performance Monitor, the second item down in the left pane, produces much the same as that mentioned for XP, but the item below - Reliability Monitor - is more interesting.

This stores data over the past 12 months, showing software installations (or removals), and failures grouped under applications, hardware, Windows and miscellaneous.

If any installs, uninstalls or failures occurred on a particular day, you’ll see a symbol in the timeline and can get details by expanding the bars below it. At the top of the timeline is an overall reliability graph.

Looking back over the past year, I had Word fail twice, Excel once, Internet Explorer once, Explorer once and the Microsoft .Net Framework assembler once. In addition, there were two ‘disruptive shutdowns’, which can probably be blamed on my electricity supplier. So, it looks as if Vista - albeit by its own reckoning - is pretty reliable. I wish I could say the same about its performance.

Headers
In a recent article, we took a brief look at the various column headers available in Vista’s Explorer and how you can add these by either right-clicking on them and choosing ‘More…’ or going to the View menu and clicking on ‘Choose details’. The choice available, as mentioned then, is vast, but it’s also context-sensitive.