How to determine the "brakes" of Windows 7 due to the use of the paging file?

Question

Windows

Good afternoon! There is a Lenovo B460e laptop with 2 GB of RAM. The installed Windows 7 works fine for some time after loading, but the further it goes, the more it starts to slow down.
I tried to install Windows XP - everything is fine in XP, it works fine even with a bunch of open Chrome tabs.
My understanding is that the problem with Win7 is that it itself uses more memory than XP, so it starts using the swap file earlier. And since the speed of the HDD in a laptop is not high - the "brakes" start from there, the processor simply cannot quickly read data from the swap.
But how do you know if this is the case? By what parameters? Should there be 100% utilization of the disk on which the swap is located?
And yet, although WinXP uses less memory than Win7, it is still not so much less that such a difference in performance results (one open tab with VK uses 200 megabytes of memory, this is already enough to level the difference in OS "gluttony", it seems to me); could there be another reason for the "brakes"? And if so, how to define it?
Thanks in advance for your replies.

Answer 1

By blinking hard drive activity diode.
Fresh Win7 after a couple of minutes of use starts the update process that eats the entire RAM and the entire processor. This may be the reason for the brakes.

Answer 2

There can be many reasons. For example, scheduled defragmentation or virus scanning with missed tasks, or a clumsy program that takes but does not give memory, which forces the use of swap. In my opinion, for Windows 7 you need from 4 GB of memory. It is clear that it works with 2-3 GB, but much worse.
If you want to check for disk brakes, run perfmon.exe and look at the Physical Disk\Average Disk Queue Length counter. If it exceeds 2 for a long time, the disk cannot cope.

Answer 3

It seems to me that in your case you need to monitor not how much swap is used, but how much RAM is used. If you do this from time to time, then a trivial Task Manager (Performance tab) is enough, and if you want to monitor it quickly, you can install a sidebar gadget called After_Meter, CPU_Monitor or similar (there are a lot of them).