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5 Essential Performance Monitoring Gadgets

Posted January 2007 by Steve Sinchak

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

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