Help with Windows XP Performance program.

[Booleywa]

I'm having a performance problem with an application on Windows XP and I'm trying to diagnose it using the Performance program in Windows XP administrative tools. I've read a tutorial on using the Performance program. I've run it and I'm getting confusing test results. I'm looking for a forum for discussing the use of Performance to solve a problem like this.

I've tried posting my problem on the microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain user forum but I've gotten no responses to my technical question.

My question is: is this the right forum for questions of this type? If not, can you direct me to a forum that is?

Here's my problem:

We have a PC with a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 running Windows XP Pro with 512
MB of RAM.

The machine runs small business accounting package.
Every day users enter various inputs by hand and then tell the program
to post the inputs. The problem is that the posting can take up to an
hour to run. (I'm talking about the time the program runs after the
user has entered the data and told the program to post.) No other
programs have a noticeable performance problem.

I know that a half a Gig of RAM sounds skimpy for Windows XP but I
want to be sure that a lack of memory is the problem before we buy
some more memory.

Task Manager tells me that the total physical memory is 523,276 bytes
and the commit charge peak is 384,836. (I've confirmed that the last
reboot was well before the last time the accounting package was run so
this commit charge peak value includes the running of the accounting
package posting.)

I also ran a log session of the Windows Performance MMC utility for
two days. It covered two days of normal activity including the
posting. Here are the relevant counters during the time period in
which the posting was running:

(values are average, max)
Memory: Page Faults/sec = 342, 1056
Memory: Page Reads/sec = 6.5, 16.1
Logical Disk: % Disk Read time = 24.9, 117
Logical Disk: Disk Reads/sec = 6.6, 16.1
Logical Disk: Avg. Disk Read Queue Length = 0.25, 1.17

I don't know what to make of this. The fact that the commit charge peak is less than the
size of physical memory seems to say that the maximum of memory
demanded is less than my physical memory so RAM is not my problem.
Then the high rate of disk reads due to virtual memory (peaking at
16.1) seems to say that memory is the bottleneck.

Can someone tell me how to interpret this picture and if more memory
will speed up this posting job?

Thanks.