How to Monitor System Performance in a Chromebook

Sep. 29, 2020

Chromebooksare popular for its dead-simple user interface and bloat-free operating system. Unlike Windows, here you won’t find system tools such as Device Manager, Performance Monitor, Event Viewer, and so on. Google believes that you don’t need such tools to check system performance since Chrome OS is not a resource hog. However, that seems to be changing as Google has added a newChrome URLcalled System Internals that allows you to monitor system performance in a Chromebook. You can view system metrics such as CPU usage, RAM allocation, and more. So if you want to learn how to access system performance in a Chromebook, follow along.

Monitor System Performance in a Chromebook

1. Open Chrome andpaste the below pathin the address bar and hit enter.

2. A System Internals window will open up. Here, you can monitor your Chromebook’s system performance such asCPU usage, memory allocation, and ZRAM information.

3. For more information on CPU cores, click on the hamburger menu located at thetop-left cornerand click on “CPU”.

4. Here, you will find the CPU performance on your Chromebook with areal-time graph of every core. You can click on the core to display or remove performance data of that particular core from the graph. You can also right-click on the graph and save it as an image for future reference.

5. Similarly, to understand RAM usage, move to the hamburger menu and open “RAM”. Here too, you can monitor RAM performance on your Chromebook in real-time. Just like the CPU cores, you can click on the type of memory toshow or hide the usagein the composite graph.

6. Finally, you canview ZRAM’s performancein a Chromebook from the same sidebar. ZRAM is sort of swap memory but it’s allocated within the RAM.

Our tutorial will work with all of the following Chromebooks. It is not an exhaustive list and is only here to serve as an example.

So that is how you can monitor system performance in a Chromebook and understand how well your machine is running. On Windows 10, there is a full-fledged Task Manager where you can view all the running tasks and also monitor system performance. Here, you don’t have such a detailed view but System Internals is starting to offer some much-needed information.

As for the Task Manager, you need to execute a specialChromebook keyboard shortcut. Just press Search + Esc to view all the background processes and you can even kill the tasks just like Windows 10. Anyway, that is all from us. If you want to learn more suchChrome OS tips and tricksthen follow our linked guide.

Passionate about Windows, ChromeOS, Android, security and privacy issues. Have a penchant to solve everyday computing problems.