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At work, we use a program that often times becomes unresponsive when in use. As part of a justified business expense of upgrading the hardware of our workstations, I wanted to track how much time is spent on waiting for a program versus actual usage.

My Google-Fu turned up results of how to resolve unresponsive programs, but not a means of tracking their unresponsiveness in a meaningful manner.

Searching on Super User resulted in this post Application that automatically tracks amount of active time spent at the computer However this would be a general tracker of computer usage rather than program unresponsiveness (or its inverse, program usage).

Any help in the right direction is greatly appreciated.

Bluebird
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    Windows 7 has something called the Reliability Monitor that I know tracks program crashes and system events that effect the reliability of a system. I don't know if this is enough information for you to use, but it might be worth checking out. – Catatonic27 Sep 26 '16 at 16:11
  • @Catatonic27 Researching it right now, as soon as windows opens the start menu... – Bluebird Sep 26 '16 at 16:12
  • @Catatonic27 at first glance, it looks like it can help me in documenting complete critical errors (crashing) but not necessarily the slowdowns during the day's work. I'll research further to see if it can also track unresponsiveness. – Bluebird Sep 26 '16 at 16:14
  • When programs temporarily go unresponsive it's usually due to waiting fro a resource to become available. You have to figure out what resource(s) it's waiting for when it's being "unresponsive". – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Sep 26 '16 at 16:25
  • @Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 In this case, I know for a fact it is due to lack of CPU processing power and/or RAM. But to justify the business expense of hardware upgrades, I need to quantify in $$$ the loss of unproductiveness. I.e. 30 minutes per person of lost time * team * days = $5,000 dollars lost. Cost of 8GB more ram = $30 per 4GB stick + IT labor. – Bluebird Sep 26 '16 at 16:27
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    I'd say a piece of paper and pen beside the console for users to record times that they're waiting is probably the best. This SU question might get you towards where you're trying to get: [How does Windows know if a program is not responding?](http://superuser.com/questions/961843/how-does-windows-know-if-a-program-is-not-responding/961877), specifically DavidPostill's answer about the [IsHungAppWindow function](http://superuser.com/a/961877/23133). – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Sep 26 '16 at 16:33
  • @Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 I think this would work for me, but convincing an entire team (when you aren't the supervisor) to do it would be well... not feasible as an intern. I've reviewed the links you've given me and am thinking that a quick program or script can be written? (no idea how to program using Windows SDK, ) – Bluebird Sep 26 '16 at 16:48
  • @BobtheBuilder, your request for general tool does not seem feasible. You are talking about "unresponsiveness" of a program. This means that someone has to initiate some request, to which the program is expected to respond. To monitor this, you would need to specify these "requests", and log the response time, which also needs to be somehow identified. How would a general tool know which request is supposed to do what, in order to track it? It is for sure that some Visual BASIC script can assist you, but you must learn the system messaging protocols. – Ale..chenski Sep 26 '16 at 17:11
  • @AliChen Sounds like a challenge then! Will report back with my findings. – Bluebird Sep 26 '16 at 18:08
  • Frankly, I don't believe you will solve any of your slowdown problems with hardware upgrade. The amount of bloatware and "experience reporting" grows at much faster rate than hardware performance. Beefing up memory and storage only means more "services" are running, more animated malware are running on you browser, and longer time to create any restore points. The real solution (and challenge) is to find a way to cut all this krap out without breaking basic Internet functionality as a major information system of our days. – Ale..chenski Sep 26 '16 at 18:51
  • @AliChen ? I didn't quite understand that... I googled "experience reporting" but I don't think it works here. My goal is to justify a hardware upgrade. As far as running more services, that isn't my call unfortunately. – Bluebird Sep 26 '16 at 18:53
  • Try CEIP, Customer Experience Improvement Program. quoting: "CEIP collects information about how our customers use Microsoft programs and about some of the problems they encounter." – Ale..chenski Sep 26 '16 at 21:53
  • "Can I review the information before it is sent to Microsoft? Unfortunately the information can't be reviewed for a couple of reasons" - unfortunately, I don't think this would be helpful. I'll keep looking. Thanks though! – Bluebird Sep 27 '16 at 13:42

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