Windows to my PC

March 26, 2006 10:41 PM

Is there an application that can give me a little window that sits on my desktop that can show various computer functions: hard disk space, cpu function, etc.? I've used Konfabulator, and it's good, but I've been having a bit of trouble with it recently and wonder if there's something similar out there. Freeware is best!
posted by zardoz to computers & internet (14 comments total)

I highly recommend GKrellM. It was originally for Linux, but there's a windows port.
posted by fvox13 at 10:44 PM on March 26, 2006

There are a lot of these. Here're a few: Kapsules, Rainmeter, Toolbox, Coolmon, and Motherboard Monitor.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:27 PM on March 26, 2006

If you're on Mac OS X, I highly recommend MenuMeters.
posted by todbot at 11:53 PM on March 26, 2006

(Good point -- I assumed Windows, and linked accordingly.)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:55 PM on March 26, 2006

Actually, the Google Desktop sidebar has a panel that presents CPU, Memory, Disk and Network utilization.

It also shows random feeds to sites I've visited, and a picture stream from local photos and web photos. And anything else you could think of.

However, it's completely customizable, so you don't have to show all that stuff, and surprisingly, not very resource-intense at all.

It also... you know... spiders your hard drive and gives you the ability to search pretty much any file and document format, including emails, web history, PDFs, etc, and jump to any program file on your computer with its nifty quick search box. A bit more than you're looking for, but turn off the "communicate my stuffs to Google" if you're concerned at all, and it's actually a really useful tool.
posted by disillusioned at 12:16 AM on March 27, 2006

Trillian has a plugin, but it's on my other machine and I can't remember the name...but if you use Trillian, I imagine you can find it.
posted by Orange Goblin at 2:49 AM on March 27, 2006

I have a solution for you, but it's time for me to head to bed- I'll write it up when I wake up, so if you're interested check back a little later today.

It's wonderfully simple, elegant, and entirely free/built into Windows XP so no installation of anything is required, is highly customizable, and may do exactly what you're looking for.
posted by hincandenza at 3:05 AM on March 27, 2006

Here's a second on gkrellm2.
posted by polyglot at 3:46 AM on March 27, 2006

Samurize has a lot of customizable plugins for this sort of thing too. It's free and also supplies an SDK so you can write your own plugins, if you like. That means that there's a lot of plugins available.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 4:17 AM on March 27, 2006

If you go for a sidebar, there is an alternative to Google's model: Desktop Sidebar
posted by bering at 7:06 AM on March 27, 2006

gkrellm2. It's got plugins for everything you might ever possibly want to monitor -- CPU temp, network stuff, mem, HDD, processes, users, CPU usage, etc.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 7:53 AM on March 27, 2006

I've tried coolmon and konfabulator and the gds sidebar but in the end I went with the very small (but full of features) statbar.

It's free, it mounts on the top or bottom of the screen, and it gives you everything from RAM/CPU/network usage to uptime, volume control, winamp remote, and display lights for the *lock keys (num, caps, scroll, and insert).

You can rearrange things, turn things on and off, and even add your own shortcuts in the style of quicklaunch on the main taskbar.
posted by tiamat at 9:47 AM on March 27, 2006

Actually, I'll rescind my solution- tiamat's, though freeware to add on, does look pretty cool and more what you're looking for.

My suggestion was going to be perfmon; you can create a perfmon layout monitoring your system including things like CPU, diskspace, mem usage, etc, then save it as an html file (since perfmon can be an activex control as well) which is easily edited and customized. You can then load that webpage as either a small active desktop item embedded in your desktop, or create it as a toolbar and embed it in a window either in the taskbar itself, or as a separate floating/docked toolbar on the side of the screen- a simple histogram or line chart, shrunk to size, could show you what's going on, and could even be linked to a circular perf binary log, so that if you see anything odd you can dig in and see historical data over time, instead of just a constant snapshot of the current state.

But statbar looks very slick and what you're looking for, and since it's the easier solution, I'll spare the details. :)
posted by hincandenza at 12:25 PM on March 27, 2006

thanks everyone for the suggestions!
posted by zardoz at 6:53 PM on March 27, 2006