Much of the information available in Server Explorer is more complete and detailed than you can find in Control Panel. In fact, even if you're not writing a program, you might want to check the detailed messages in the Event Logs to monitor and diagnose your computer's operation.
And you can write programs using much of this information too. Here's another example, there are pages of different Performance Counters that report every aspect of your computer's operation that you can imagine. You can add them to a Visual Basic project by dragging and dropping them on a form much like the Data Adapter and Connection components that we've been working with. After a Performance Counter has been added, you can collect samples of the information reported back very simply. The next page shows the code to report the point value of the 'read' speed of a hard drive after filling the DataGrid as shown in our text book. (The parameter passed to the ToString method is "N zero" - this formats the number as a numeric with no decimal places.)
