Best Free Resource Meter

Spotlight on Windows - Quest Sowftare is offering this truly amazing resource metering software for free. It is the most complete, most attractive and most feature rich application for free in this category that I have seen so far. It works on Windows 2000 and higher and even though the current version is from 2006 it worked like breeze in Vista as well. SoW monitors all systems relevant resources and displays it in a most professional way. The home screen (see screenshot) is arranged like your system architecture and even shows traffic between the components. You can see the CPU accessing the memory, and view the latter grabbing data from the disk and page files for example. For each system activity thresholds can be configured and when reached an alarm is displayed via a tooltip popup from the tray icon. Each measured resource can be viewed in detail in a separate screen as well. The charts are configurable in content and design and are simply beautiful. You can also access a remote PC in your domain, however, I could not get that to work in my Windows workgroup. The only thing that I was not happy with was that I did not find a way to adjust font and font size and that I could not change the the "Theoretical Bandwidth Limit" which is used as the max value for the NIC card traffic display. That is 100MBit on Ethernet for example so no wonder that most of the times there is no visible activity, except you transfer a large file from one computer to another in your local network. However, the detailed charts show all traffic. SoW is meant to be used as a full screen application. There is no option to use other display modes, transparency or such things if you want to have certain values visible at the edge of your desktop or so. For dedicated monitoring however,
it is the best free application in this category.

Vista Side Bar - With Vista, Microsoft delivered an excellent metering and desktop info tool, the Vista Side Bar. It offers the biggest collection of metering and desktop info modules combined with great skinning capabilities. The VSB is completely configurable per display module. You can either organize the modules on the sidebar, or arrange them freely on the desktop. VSB Gadgets are open XML/HTML files that can be reprogrammed (or even newly created) if you have very specific requirements. However, considering there are hundreds of Gadgets freely available on Microsoft's VSB site you will probably not have to. I did the excercise because I wanted certain system information be displayed in a specific way. I have a screenshot of those placed left of this paragaph (click on it for a larger version). For Vista machines this is an excellent choice for resource metering. At Gil's Method you can also find an installer for XP.

I was asked a few times about the gadgets I used in the screen shot on the left. One I programmed myself (Netget), all others are existing gadgets that I altered towards my requirements. You can download them here. Just unpack the gadget directories into your Sidebar gadget folder. It is usally found in c:\[user directory]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\. Enjoy.

TinyResMeter is a small and simple but fast and effective metering tool. While it does not offer much options to change its presentation (just font and color) it offers a wide variety of information to display like CPU usage, RAM usage, number of processes, and much more. It is amazing how much features can be put in a 55KB file. It also takes only a minimum of resources itself which makes it even more attractive. However, in the age of multi processor environments and graphical user interfaces TinyResMeter seems to have grown a little old. Considering the many competitors offering a more user friendly interface, more monitoring features, and customizable designs, TinyResMeter is surely not state of the art. But it might still be the right choice for some.

StatBar presents itself as a graphical bar at the top or he bottom of your screen (the image on the left just shows a part of it). You can place as many meters in the bar as you have space available. It offers a wide variety of metering information, and most are configurable. It also offers operational modules for controlling sound volume, quick launching applications, operating your WinAmp player, or toggling Caps Lock, Num Lock etc. StatBar is graphically more attractive than TinyResMeter, but not configurable in size which makes it hard to read on large screen resolutions. It offers six color schemes, and transparency when using Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

Rainmeter is one of the contenders that puts a lot of weight in the graphical representation of the metered information. It offers skinning, opening the option to individually design your own gauges and meters. Many ready to download skins are available on most skinning sites. They are easy to install, just copy the dowloaded files into the skin directory. Certain parameters of these skins can be edited via *.ini files. It is a little cryptic for a non programmer but once you get the hang of it it's not that difficult. Rainmeter also brings more elements into the game, like news ticker and weather watch. Very convenient is the fact that you can display each module seperately. You just enable those you want to see. 

Rainmeter is designed for XP and also runs under Vista. It won't run under W2K unless you download and install a missing DLL, gdiplus.dll. The weather module did not work for me, nor did the Help function. Workaround: If you want to display the help file browse to the Rainmeter installation directory on your hard disk and doubleclick the file Rainmeter.chm. It also seems that the product is not supported anymore. The homepage is only rudimentary.       

Systmetrix - is a great choice in this category. It combines a wide variety of metering, controlling and info gauges with an excellent skinability. The list of modules seems endless, including CPU, RAM, Drive Space, Page file, Network, Player Controls, Weather, Battery, SSID, motherboard info, and more. It enjoys high popularity on the top skinning sites. There are beautiful skins available for every taste and target usage, from small bars (if you only want to use a small amount of space at the top of your screen) to large gauges that you can place on a monitoring PC to watch from a distance. Like Rainmeter, Sysmetrix allows to just display those modules you want. You can freely move them around your desktop, and decide if you want to have them stay on top of your applications or let them disappear behind them. Sysmetrix offers different types of display: analog, text, bar, histogram, image-based graphs, interactive buttons, gauge, animations. It also offers great weather and time zone information capabilities.

Unfortunately Sysmetrix, like Rainmeter, does not seem to be supported anymore or being developed further.  The current version 3.41 is from 2006. It still works fine up to Windows XP. But in Vista, I noticed that the network traffic metering does not work anymore. Retrieving network traffic data seemed to have changed in Vista since other older metering software also fail in this regard (TinyResMeter, Rainmeter).

FreeMeter - by Tiler.com comes in two flavours. FreeMeter Pro for ca. 22 USD and a less feature-rich free version just called FreeMeter. The free version makes a solid impression on first sight. It covers CPU, Disk, RAM and Page File usage. The disk usage is seperated in disk space usage and disk traffic, which is a great idea that I did not find in any of the other tools. While the available/used space is displayed in a text based spreadsheet (one row per drive) the disk traffic is shown in a bar/line graph. The information about RAM and Page File usage can be displayed in text and/or graph form. I noticed that the RAM meter only accounts for 2 GB RAM (instead of 3 on my test machine) though. Obviously there is a limit there, too bad. There are quite many parameters in FreeMeter that can be configured. You can adjust certain settings of the meters like bar or line graph, height, timer and such. However, I would have loved if there was more, specifically things like background, font and bar width, if not skinning capabilities for that matter. It also disappointed me that the application window could only be adjusted in width and not in height. A very nice feature on the other hand is that each graph can be configured to be also shown as a little indicator in the task bar. So without even opening the application window you always have optical control of your machine's utilization. Some features like the alert thresholds are disabled and only available in the Pro version. FreeMeter offers a fair value for a free tool, however, I would not chose it over the other contenders here.