MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-270): Installing ...

Objective 4.1 Monitor, Optimize, and Troubleshoot Performance of the Windows XP Professional Desktop
Objective 4.1 Answers
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1. Correct Answers: C
A. Incorrect: Windows XP Professional uses the paging file to temporarily store
data from the computer’s memory. Decreasing the size of the paging file increases
the free space on the system’s hard disk, but it does not improve the system’s performance.
B. Incorrect: NTFS allows files and directories to be compressed at the file system
level. This allows compressible files to consume less space on the hard disk.
Although compressing files increases the free space on the hard disk, it does not
improve the system’s performance.
C. Correct: Hard disks perform best when file data is written in contiguous blocks.
Over time, however, file data can become broken into discontiguous fragments.
Although the hard disk is still able to access fragmented files, they take longer to
load. Because the user’s performance problem was most noticeable when accessing
files, and no maintenance had been done in at least a year, the cause of the
problem is most likely disk fragmentation. Running the Disk Defragmenter utility
resolves this problem and drastically improves disk performance on affected systems.
D. Incorrect: The Performance Logs and Alerts service is used when logging data
for performance analysis. Although it is necessary for logging performance data,
simply starting the service does not improve system performance.
2. Correct Answers: A, B, and E
A. Correct: CPU utilization is shown both numerically and graphically on the Performance
tab of the Windows Task Manager.
B. Correct: Network utilization is shown both numerically and graphically on the
Networking tab of the Windows Task Manager.
C. Incorrect: Page file utilization information is not available from the Windows
Task Manager.
D. Incorrect: Packet loss cannot be viewed from the Windows Task Manager. However,
executing the command NETSTAT -S -P TCP from the command line shows
the Segments Retransmitted statistic, which is very similar to overall packet loss.
E. Correct: Memory usage is shown both numerically and graphically on the Performance
tab of the Windows Task Manager.
F. Incorrect: Open files cannot be viewed from the Windows Task Manager.