Keeping score as you tweak Windows for speed

Windows has many faults.  It's a virus magnet, it's too plump, its flaky and it's slow.  We poor Redmond victims can't do much about the first three items, but we can do something about the the last one.  You can make Windows somewhat less sluggish.  It can be hard to tell if your tweaks are helping or hurting.  You can keep score with  Windows Task Manager. 
    Task Manager is easy to start.  Just hit control-alt-delete and Task Manager will open his window.  He has five tabs, Applications, Processes,Performance and Networking. 
   Applications shows what "real" programs you have running.  A "real" program is one you started with a mouse click, which displays a screen window and has code taking up RAM and CPU run time.  About all the Application window is good for is shutting down applications (End Task in Winspeak)  that have frozen up and no longer respond to mouse or keyboard.
   Processes is a more interesting tab for the tweaker.  Process is Winspeak for any program that takes up RAM and needs CPU time.  All sorts of things take up RAM and CPU time but don't show a screen window.  My Blackbox has 26 processes burdening the hardware.  When he was new from the store he had nearly 50.  The only good process is a dead process.  Any tweaks you can do to shut off unneeded processes will make your machine run faster.  Most processes are actually part of Windows and you can't do anything about them. All the Applications running in the Application Window will also show in the process window.  The code part counts as a (sometimes more than one) process.  Along with the process name, you want to see how much memory each process is using, how much CPU time it uses and how many I/O writes (disk writes) it is doing. 
If these numbers don't show in the process window, click on "View" on the taskbar and then "Select  Columns".  Put a check mark on the properties (there are dozens of properties) that you want to see.   The organized Windows tweaker will keep notes.  Note down the number of processes, and keep track of it. Fewer is better.
  Process window will show any virus you may be blessed with.  As of this writing, anything running will always show up in the process window.  The trick is to identify the virus amid the blizzard of  ordinary processes.  Especially as many virus take the name of perfectly legitimate parts of Windows. 
   The Performance tab  gives score on memory usage.  Physical Memory  Total, is all the real RAM on your system.  Available is what you think it is.  System Cache is used as a disc cache.  Windows keeps recently accessed disk data in the cache on the idea that it might be needed again soon.  It saves a time consuming disk access each the cache hits.  When RAM runs low, windows can reduce the size of cache to make more memory available.  Kernel Memory Total is RAM taken for Windows use and cannot be used by programs.  Any tweak that reduces Kernel Memory Total makes more RAM available to your programs.