5 Essential Performance Monitoring Gadgets

The new sidebar in Windows Vista provides many opportunities to present the user with information. For those of you that like to monitor your system performance, the sidebar is the perfect place to run various performance monitoring gadgets. Windows Vista ships with a simple CPU and Memory usage gadget, however, there are many more gadgets out there that are much more useful and help you monitor almost every aspect of Windows.

1. Wireless Signal and IP Address Gadget

This gadget displays your wireless network information such as it's status, signal strength and security. This gadget also displays your internal IP and gives you a direct link to your router's / wireless gateway's web based control panel.

2. Battery Meter Gadget

Monitor the battery level of your laptop with this gadget.  This gadget provides a much more accurate level reading than the tiny system tray icon.

3. Multi-Meter Gadget

Info shown: - Cpu usage % ( 2 cores ) - Ram Usage % - Ram info ( Total, used, left size) - Status bars animated above 90% - 100 Skins + background selection

4. Uptime Gadget

This gadget allows you to see how much time has passed since you last restarted your computer.

5. Free Space Gadget

This gadget monitors your PC's drives and shows you the available space for those you've selected

Credit goes to TweakVista.com

 

You need to register to download it and you'll need to have speedfan 4.33 installed, but I have mine set to show temps on CPU, MCP, and all 4 cores, as well as CPU HSF speed and Vcore.

 

As far as Everest goes, I did my own dual boot installation almost as soon as I got my new system, so I never saw Everest on my computer before wiping everything out. I saw an Everest based gadget but never bothered trying it out as Everest costs money and Speedfan doesn't. Now that I know Everest should be somewhere in my DSO system disk package, I may try that out.