Vista system resource logging

Not something I've done very much of.

I'd like to setup long-term loggin of:

Memory usage. I appreciate that Vista caches the memory where possible, but in the Task Manageer it usually reports the memory in use on a graph. In my case, as I type this it's 1.4GB out of 4GB.

Swapfile usage. I'm a believer in static swapfiles, and have mine set as minimum of 6GB and maximum of 8GB, and I never get warnings of any sort.

I'm looking to monitor both and generally tweak the swapfile a little, and possibly allocate some memory for other tasks, based on the logs. I'd prefer a simple setup of logs, rather than the standard MS help pages (which confuse the hell out of me, and never give me the answer I want).

If possible I'd like to graph the results, but will settle for max, average and so on. Anyone done this?

I sussed out the page faults /sec and memory usage, but although I've added swapfile in use, it doesn't register on the graph (even as zero). Hmm.

Performance Monitor is the tool for this sort of logging.

Just a heads up for anyone interested. In keeping with my other thread of 'unnecessary services', I've been monitoring my pagefile usage. I finally found the best way to do so in Vista.

Start perfmon.

Right click the 'Performnace Monitor' option on the left menu and click properties. Click the 'Data' tab. Click 'Add', and find the option in the list called 'Process' (not processor). Within the sub list, click on 'Page File Bytes Peak', and then click 'Add' below, then click OK. Remove the 'Processor ( Total)\% Processor Time' from the list if you like, then click the 'Graph' tab. Change the drop down option from 'Line' to 'Report', then Apply, OK.

You should see the Pagefile bytes peak as a simple number. Now run as much stuff as you like to max out things and see how high your pagefile climbs. I tried:

20 browser tabs
E-mail client
Calc
Notepad
Sizeable PDF
Several Spreadsheets
Half a dozen Explorer windows
A sizeable game.

Given that I very rarely browset the web and play games, it's unlikely I'll need all that, and I never have 20 tabs open. My swapfile started around 1GB then rose up to a max of 1.43GB, so I have changed it from 6144 (Windows recommended 1.5x of RAM) to 2GB as a minimum, and 3GB as a maximum. Freed up 4GB of disk space and am pretty sure I'll never need the 3GB.

Not sure if it's important, but I remember that with W2K Pro that the setting had to be a multiple of 32, so am assuming that with x64 setups to have the min and max settings as multiples of 64 (2048 and 3072).

Done a defrag, tidied things up, and the system is noticeably faster at regular tasks. Not sure why this should be, but it is.