Want to watch your Windows performance? Curiously there aren’t many Windows Vista gadgets (a poor imitation of OS X’s dashboard IMHO) out there to keep track of CPU and RAM usage. Most are pretty similar, but I’ve settled on All CPU Meter. It’s got a nice display of CPU and RAM usage with appropriate bar meters and a CPU line graph.
Meanwhile, keeping track of your various computer temperatures is a bit convoluted. The ONLY gadget I’m aware of is Speedfan Meter. The latest version is 1.5 (not 1.2, as labeled in the picture).
Unfortunately since I’ve downloaded this awhile ago, the original website is down. I’ve managed to locate an alternate source here. Please leave me a comment if it’s no longer available and I’ll upload a copy for people to download. But that’s just step one. The gadget itself is just a display. It actually needs the program SpeedFan running in the background.
This is a regular application, not a gadget, so you’ll need to download and install this software on it’s own. Finally, the labels in the gadget are very ambiuous. You’ll see labels like Temp1, Temp2, etc. with coordinating temperatures. So you’ll need to go back to the SpeedFan program, go to the ‘Readings’ tab, and click on configure. There will be a column called ‘chip’ telling you which piece of hardware coordinates to each temperature you see on the gadget. Go back to the gadget’s configuration, which will let you change the labels, and label accordingly. Are we done? Kind of. If you restart your computer your gadget will read no temperatures because SpeedFan doesn’t start by default. To get this configuration running automatically at startup, make a shortcut for the SpeedFan application and drag it to the Startup folder in your Start menu. If you don’t want this program covering your screen at start up, click on ‘configure’ in the ‘Readings’ tab, go to the ‘Options’ tab and check the box ’start minimized’
I told you this whole process was convoluted. How convenient. Yay gadgets!
