Performance Monitor

Performance Monitor is a simple program, developed specifically in order to help individuals monitor their CPU, memory, disk and network usage.
The interface is straightforward and intuitive, and therefore allows any type of person to easily work with it, regardless of their previous experience with computers. It is comprised of four windows which contain graphical representations of each performance component.
This software utility is highly customizable, seeing that there are a few skins to choose from, background and foreground colors, as well as opacity (from 20% to 100%) can be changed, labels can be shown or hidden, and graphs can be displayed as piles or lines.
You can send the app in the system tray or activate the “Pass-Through Mode” (mouse actions do not interfere with the desktop panels) thus, greatly enhancing ease of use.
By right clicking on the system tray icon or on the main window, you bring up a context menu which enables you to backup or restore positions, apply the pass-through mode, exit Performance Monitor and access the online Help content or settings panel.
The last mentioned pane lets you always place this utility’s frame on top of all other applications, change the update interval from 10 to 0.5 seconds, show one graph for each CPU, as well as for network upload and download or disk read and write rates. In addition to that, you can change the size of each window and establish the maximum bandwidth.
All in all, Performance Monitor is a useful piece of software for monitoring your computer’s resources from the desktop. It does not get in the way and it has a good response time. A portable counterpart is also available.