Something many of our readers have asked for is a quick overview of new and useful tools and features in Windows. Today we are launching a new series, called our “Two Minute Drill” – these will be brief posts that provide a high-level view of tools and features. We have already published several posts in this vein over the last year or so, but we are going to go back and add the “Two Minute Drill” tag to these posts to make them easier to find. Hopefully you enjoy these posts, and keep providing feedback on other topics that you would like to see. Enough with the Administrative, on with the Substantive …

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 introduced several new features to assist users and administrators in diagnosing performance-related issues. Today, we are going to take a look at the System Diagnostics Report which provides a snapshot view of your system. The report itself gathers data for 60 seconds, and then may take an additional 60-90 seconds to generate the report. To generate a System Diagnostics Report, run the perfmon /report command from the Run line or from a command prompt. Generating a System Diagnostics Report requires privilege elevation, so you will need to consent to the elevation prompt or provide credentials depending on how UAC is configured on your systems.