Some VERY basic questions re Process Explorer

I already have an Antivirus (AV) for the computer I am presently using but I am re-activating an older laptop with only 4gb RAM & a 2 core cpu. Accordingly, I need to pay some attention to the amount of resources used by the various AVs I am considering for it.

Q1- As pertains to Process Explorer (PE), the "Working Set" column is probably its closest approximation of each process's Ram usage, correct?

Q2- Which is PE's best indicator of a process's impact on a laptop's liveliness or sluggishness: cpu time, or cycles, or I/O total rate, or... some other measure?

 

Hmmm... couple of days with zero replies. Are my questions: (a) stupid?, or (b) boring?, or (c) too hard?

 

For me the answer is ( C ) as I don't use it. Hope you get a pertinent answer soon.

 

Q1 - yes, you can use that info for RAM usage approximation.

Q2 - harder to say. CPU time can show if AV conducts CPU intensive operations. I/O activity can show if there's a lot of HDD activity happening. IF you have HDD instead of SSD, it can slow down your system. I prefer when AV loads more data in RAM and doesn't read/write to disk all the time.

For me more RAM is better than less RAM usage. CPU usage is not that important unless on demand scan is run - I prefer it's conducted with low CPU priority.

 

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170654/how-to-interpret-windows-task-manager

for me i/O reads and writes, and their respective rates.

 

Great link, guest. I now understand Working Set much better now.

P.S. Keep your hands off my crayons.

 

Old article but still useful =

 

Can you perhaps tell me the difference between I/O writes and disk writes? What exactly is I/O?

 

They are the same thing.

https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/I/I_O.html

 

https://superuser.com/questions/993...writes-and-i-o-read-bytes-or-write-bytes-mean

 

Guys, I still don't understand. In all system monitoring tools you see that there's a difference, for example when there is no disk activity, you might still get to see I/O writes and reads, so how can this be the same thing?

 

@Rasheed187 , Disk activity isn't exactly same as I/O activity, if they were, you won't have different column for them.

 

I agree. I/O activity is not only disk I/O activity. I remember that, when I was using Malware Defender, it's process had constant I/O activity although it didn't read and write to disk much. IMO that activity had something to do with all controls it was conducting (disk, memory, process, network activity...).

 

That's exactly my point.

OK so can we conclude that I/O writes and reads haven't got anything to do with disk writes and reads?

 

I've noticed that Vivaldi also constantly produces both I/O reads and writes, so I think it's safe to assume that it's not the same as disk writes and reads.