While working on my friends computer today installing the COMODO AV for him, he saw the Windows 7 Performance Monitor that I use. He asked if he could have that installed on his Windows XP system, and I said that this gadget that I am using on Windows 7 would not work with Windows XP, but maybe there is a similar program out there for XP.

To my surprise there was. I was thinking if I found something it would be no better than the one already a part of Windows XP when launching task manager and then minimizing it in which you get the green CPU usage box in the tray area.

I was surprised that this Performance Monitor always stays on top by default. This is easily changed through a check box under settings. And its good that they added the ability to uncheck this as for my initial placement had it to the far right and it conflicted with the slider bar when mousing over it in which a mouse over causes it to display stats for CPU, Memory, Hard Drive, and Network use depending on which one your pointer is over.

I figured I'd share this here in case anyone else is interested in it. Also if there are any better ones, more features etc feel free to share them. I think this one covers it all although it doesnt show temperatures. If it showed CPU and GPU temp graphs that would make it all that much better to keep an eye on system health.

Of the 4 stats that this displays the most useful to me is the CPU, Memory, and Network graphs. The CPU graph is helpful when knowing that the CPU is running at 100% etc and why? at times if idle or unexpected activity is seen. The Memory graph is useful to know when multitasking if your pushing the system beyond its memory limitations as well as you can keep an eye on memory leaks or abnormalities. The Network monitor is helpful when you dont expect network traffic and all of a sudden there is a upload that is not expected etc.

I have used gadgets on my Windows 7 system to detect problems with CPU, Memory, and Network usage and fix the problems.

Examples would be:

CPU Usage: Detected a dysfunctional program that after it was closed it still had services/threads running that should have also ended. ( * Freeware Bugs/Design Flaws )

Memory Usage: There was a version of Firefox a while back that when LEFT open would slowly eat up more and more RAM. This was after it was left open for hours. When closing Firefox the problem would be fixed. I think it was a bug with some sort of cache that it used that would just continue to grow. It pointed out a Freeware program I was using that was written in Delphi that had a memory leak which pointed out why it would crash. I was able to fix this memory leak crash condition by feeding the program smaller work chunks and then closing and relaunching the program with smaller chunks of automated parsing instructions to carry out from a list.

Network Usage: This has been most helpful in detecting while eyes are already on the monitor that something is either communicating with your system that is unexpected or your system is unexpectedly sending data outbound to some unknown connection. I was then able to quickly launch wireshark and look at the traffic and find that the free game I installed a few days prior made my system a seed in a bit torrent network. I killed off my system acting as a seed since I dont like being a seed. Games like these should have an option in their configuration to enable/disable the seed function of the clients, but if they made it too easily disabled it could cripple the way that their game is updated among their customer base.

http://www.hexagora.com/en_dw_davperf.asp

The download that I selected from their site was the zipped package 300k file which is without the Windows installer. Although I downloaded both versions the stand alone and the one with the Win32 installer and both came up clean on a virus scan from comodo. If using the Win32 installer version just keep a look out for any check boxes etc if it wants to change anything such as home page of browser, search engine, or if it wants to add anything unwanted.

I am actually going to try this out on my Windows 7 system now as for I have been using gadgets when Microsoft stated a ways back that they should be no longer used and the service disabled that allows for them to function. The risk with the gadgets is mainly if you use one that is dirty with Windows 7, it can give an attacker remote access to your system. The gadgets i have been using i have been using for many YEARS and 3 of them are clean. But to be as secure as can be maybe i can disable them if this Performance Monitor does it all without keeping a door open for vulnerability of a system. Also I like that you can set these to always be on top, so when testing software etc I can keep an eye on the systems behavior internally vs having to size a window down to allow for space to look at the graphs on the side on the same display of a single display computer.

First Pic shows how its staying on top even when playing music video on youtube.

Second Pic shows mouse over details which i took multiple screenshots and pieced them together into a single picture for the graph details as for you only get 1 group of details at a time for whichever your moused over.

Third Pic shows the ability to disable the Always on Top feature.

[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]Perfmon (Performance Monitor) has been around since NT 3.1 in some form or another. I just checked a NT4 VM and it's present, though it doesn't show anything when minimized and effectively just charts and/or logs data values.

For temperatures they aren't implemented by default likely because they are motherboard-specific and there is no fully standardized way to determine them. programs like HwMonitor and Speedfan basically poke their fingers all over the address space looking for ways to identify where to read temperature/sensor data.

As it happens, this can cause problems- By way of example, if I run speedfan on this system, I get a BSOD instantly. Needless to say I don't think people would look favourably on a Windows Release that BSOD'd their system at startup!

Though temperatures aren't implemented stock, the Performance Counter feature is extendable. Intel has a program that adds counters for an Intel CPU:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-performance-counter-monitor

From the screenies there are some "thermal" options.
BC Thanks for info on PCM. I wasn't aware that Intel made this. Definitely going to check this out.

Also thanks for info on Speedfan that I was not aware of with the poking all over address space looking for hardware monitors. All this time I thought they were using some sort of generic universal instructions to initialize and access the temp, fan speed, and CPU core info vs basically address scanning a range for a successful hit.

Interesting that Speedfan causes BSOD with your system. The worst I have ever had with it is not detecting any hardware monitors on such as a Pentium 4 Dell System at work in which I wanted to see if the CPU was running hot or not. Suspecting the thermal compound was probably dried up. I ended up having to just go into the bios and look at the hardware monitor there which confirmed that the CPU was idling at 53C which should have been like 30-39C without a load since the room temp was not all that hot. Sure enough when removed the heatsink it was all dry and chalky after 9 years.

The only feature in Speedfan that I ever saw as potentially dangerous was the overclock features that it has. I never played with these and for all my overclocking I do it all in the system BIOS manually vs using a software tool like this. The warning that they give you for this Clock Tab was enough to scare me away from messing with it.

This system by the way is my old system a Athlon 64 x2 4450B normally a 2.3Ghz CPU that I have overclocked 10% in the BIOS Manually by change of the FSB for memory from 200Mhz to 220Mhz x 11.5 multiplier. Decided to show the gadgets that this Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium is using. * I edited the pic to hide the IP info. Normally it shows your IP and your IP lease from ISP that the modem is using etc.



[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]Not entirely related but my ancient K6-2 system which was my main machine when I joined this forum and for a time afterwards had an overheating issue. In particular it occurred while playing games. The Alarm would sound which was basically a repeating set of high-low beeps that sounded like sirens.

The highest temperature I saw after REBOOTING the system and getting access to the BIOS sensors was over 100 degrees centigrade 

Later I reworked the system by replacing components. I gave it a new power supply, which fixed a lot of stability problems, and I replaced the heatsink/fan with a aftermarket super socket 7 cooler. This was after I did my furst complete build so I had the thermal paste which is partly why I decided to do it.

The overheating issue was pretty obvious. Rather than thermal paste, it had a thermal pad. And it had turned to dust.

Yah the older AMD's liked to roast when the pads dried up. The pink pad material between heatsink and CPU of my Athlon XP 2800+ dried up back in 2008 and in the middle of gaming world of warcraft with a raid event it went into a melt down condition and shutdown. The only good thing about this is that I wasnt the tank or healer and cause a group wipe, and I had a Pentium 4 2Ghz system that I was able to TURN on and get back into the game, however with much worse performance due to the fact that I only had a PCI GeForce 4 MX440 with 64MB Video RAM compared to the AGP Geforce 6800 GT in the system that melted down, and so graphics settings were set to lowest to get 15-20 fps and was able to get back in in less than 10 minutes. The bad news though was that the CPU was toast. Surprisingly there was no thermal overload protection to shutdown before melt down and so it cooked itself to death. The green waffer had a nice brown blister on it off to the side of the CPU core. And it was also chalky like you described with your K6-2