To best manage the performance of your Windows 2000 installation, I recommend using the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to customise the tools available to you. To bring up the MMC, type "MMC" in the Start/Run box. This will open a blank MMC. Then select Add/Remove Snap In from the Console menu, and select the items you wish to use. You will probably want to add Defragmenter, Services, Event Viewer and Device Manager as a minimum. When you are finished save your changes, and create a desktop shortcut to the file you have saved. If you wish you can set Event Viewer to show error messages only: right click on Application, Security and System in turn, select Properties and uncheck the options you do not require.

Windows 2000 has a whole raft of tools to help you diagnose performance. The two most important tools available to you are Performance, and Task Manager. Performance (formerly Performance Monitor) is available as a snap-in for MMC, and can give very detailed information and logs on all aspects of system performance, see here for more details. Task Manager gives you more of a snapshot of performance but does allow you to manage applications that might be slowing down your system. For more information on how to use Task Manager to optimise your system, see here.

PERFORMANCE COUNTER ERRORS

You may find that the default performance monitors that Windows 2000 runs give error messages in Event Viewer. By default Windows 2000 runs many performance monitors in the background, including disk, system and network performance. If you get any error messages relating to any of the performance counters such as perfmon, perfnet, perfdisk, perfctrs (including the common error: Unable to read IO control information from NBT device) you can manually disable the individual monitors using the programme exctrlst.exe, in the Windows 2000 Resource Kit. The file can be downloaded here. Simply run the programme, and uncheck the Performance Counters Enabled box against any counters you wish to disable.