This is kinda gaming software.... Question

When you bring up the control-alt-delete thing and you go to view it gives you the option of "show kernal times". What is this kernal times and could you use it somehow to know about how much your hardware is being stressed?

 

Your kernal times give parameters for paged an unpaged RAM. If you are looking to know how much of the processor is being 'stressed' then look at # of processes, cpu usage, and to a lesser extent, physical memory.

 

I was just wandering what that thing always meant. I had an idea but was never sure.

 

kernel times = how much CPU time is spent in kernel space.

And to elaborate a bit, modern CPU's (as in, everything since the 386) support running in two modes:
Kernel mode (or privileged mode, or, in the case of PC cpu's, it's also called ring 0) is where the OS kernel is run. This is the "unlimited" mode, where you can do anything you like, where physical hardware is visible (including physical memory. Normally applications only see virtual memory), and where "special" instructions can be executed (such as communicating with other CPU cores, or changing between 16/32/64 bit modes).
It's also where most drivers run, because it's where the physical hardware is visible.

And then there's user-mode, which is one big illusion. This is where regular applications run. Here, you don't see the physical hardware or the actual memory, you just see interfaces to the drivers handling the hardware, and you see virtual memory addresses. When using either of these, it's up to the kernel and the drivers to figure out how to translate this to actions on the physical hardware. And there's a lot of stuff you can't do in user mode. You can't decide to suddenly reboot the computer or switch to 64-bit mode. You can't decide to go into kernel mode either.

Basically, user mode is a little pocket universe, where applications are under the illusion that they're alone, that no other processes are running or using memory, and where they can't do serious harm to the rest of the system.

Turned into a long story...

Anyway, when the task manager shows you kernel times, it shows you how much time has been spent by the CPU in kernel mode. That is, how much time has been spent doing "privileged stuff".
Or even more specifically, how much time has been spent in the OS kernel and in drivers. This should ideally be low, because it's not time spent by the application itself. It's time spent figuring out how to reflect the application's private pocket universe on the physical graphics card or the physical harddrive or the physical network card.

Unfortunetely, there's not much you can use it for unless you're developing high-performance software yourself.
Game developers might use it to see how much time is being used by their game, and how much by Direct3d (because D3D can be a CPU hog if you don't use it right), but for "normal" users, don't bother with it.

If you want to see how much hardware is being stressed, well, a good start would be to ask which hardware. Task Manager and the Performance Monitor (administrative tools) can show you I/O requests, number of memory accesses and many other details.
And if you just want to see if the CPU is being stressed, just look at the overall CPU usage, kernel mode or no.