first of I should mention that I have essentialy no coding skills in any programing language except for a very beginner level understanding of c. What I would like to know is what language would be the easiest to learn and also be capable of interfacing with hardware cpus and with windows, without too much hastle. This language also needs to be capable of being always synchronized with some sort of clock, and be able to record data input (input from the hardwares onboard controllers and from windows OS) and arrange it according to a timeline, in a format that doesnt take up to much hard disk space. It should be capable of running in the background and take up very little system resources as well.

You've found it! It is called C.


:davis:

would you recomend just plain C or perhaps C++ or c#? Do you think I would need OOP for a poiject like this?

Thanks for your help.

The first question is a "project like" what?!

If you have to ask about C#, you're not ready for low-level. C# is an example of what NOT to use for low-level systems development.

I'm still incredibly curious as to why you think that you need "OOP" for a project like "this," but which is undefined so far.

There are many "pros" to using C++, but there are also a number of "cons." They need to be understood and realized before anything meaningful will be clear.

The program I intend to build will measure the stress that certain programs, events,setting,actions etc place on the systems resources. It will be much like the task manager with graphs that show cpu and mem usage as well as the current usage of each process, only I intend for it to measure alot more than just those specific metircs. As it measures the use of resources it records the values and arranges them in chronological order in some sort of database. I realy have no idea what something like this entails so thats about all the technical details I can provide.

Click: Start->Run
Type: perfmon
Press: ENTER


:davis:

That is exactly the kind of stuff I have in mind. I want my program to record the data for all of those "counters" at once and store it all in a database. At the same time it will record a much more complete and detailed account of so called system stability. It will also record detailed information about the operation of certain processes, for example how long it takes for the mozilla browser to open after executing it etc.

It seems I may be able to do all that with perfmon but thats not enough for what im planning because the program has to be able to take output from the database and use it as input into other processes, on the fly. In other words the program will be proccessing info in the database as it is received in real time.

Thanks again for the help you have provided. That perfmon is a cool program, exactly the kind of stuff i was thinking of. I could mess with it for a while.

peace

There is an entire API available to you used by perfmon. I don't recall the details. Perhaps: www.wilsonmar.com

...will help?


:davis:

I read the page you recommended it was very enlightening. I never heard of an API before either, but I new there must be something like it that would allow one program to communicate with another program, or data format. It seems Performance Counters are a well documented/supported and windows integrated method of getting the data input I want, but theres just one problem. The visual studio documentation says that performance counters are not supported by windows 98 or windows millenium edition. I have Vista but I definetly want this program to work on those OS so does that mean that I will have to find a different (more low level) method of doing this? Btw I am sort of assuming that performance counters are part of the perfmon API and that therefore said API will not work on those OS either, or am I wrong?

thanx for the help Davis, your the best