Best Free Resource Meter

Resource Meter software displays specific system-related information, mostly about how your available resources like CPU capacity, memory space or disk space are currently in use (or available). Engineers use these utilities regularly because they can reveal reasons for a loss in performance or how busy your machine is. Some of these programs concentrate more on the information itself, others offer great designs and skinning possibilities too.  

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.

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 my top choice for resource metering. In the aeroexperience forum you can also find information how to patch VSB so it runs under XP.

Product Details

TinyResMeter
Website:http://perso.accelance.net/~pesoft/trm/us_trm.html
Download link:http://perso.accelance.net/~pesoft/trm/us_trm.html
Author: PESoft
Current version: 0.96a, a later version 0.97 is available to PESoft newsletter subscribers
File Size: 54KB
License: Freeware
Operating Systems Supported: All 32 Windows versions, (some restrictions in Vista)
64 bit capable: No
Any special system requirements: No
Portable version available: This version is portable
Additional software required : No

StatBar
Website: http://www.statbar.nl/
Download link:http://www.statbar.nl/download.php
Author: Mr B
Current version: 2.406
File Size: 1.65MB
License: Freeware
Operating Systems Supported: All 32 bit Windows versions
64 bit capable: No
Any special system requirements: No
Portable version available: No
Additional software required : No

Rainmeter
Website: http://www.ipi.fi/~rainy/legacy.html
Download page: as above
Author:
Current version:
File Size:
License: Freeware
Operating Systems Supported: 32 bit Windows versions from W2K >, (some restrictions in Vista)
64 bit capable: Yes
Any special system requirements:
Portable version available: No
Additional software required : No

FreeMeter
Website: http://www.tiler.com/freemeter/
Download page: http://www.tiler.com/freemeter/download/
Author: Tiler.com
Current version: 2.8
File Size: ~ 900 KB
License: Freeware
Operating Systems Supported: 32 bit Windows versions from W2K
64 bit capable: No
Any special system requirements:
Portable version available: No
Additional software required : No

Sysmetrix
Website: http://www.xymantix.com
Download page: http://www.xymantix.com/sysmetrix/download.html
Author:
Current version:
File Size:
License: Freeware
Operating Systems Supported: 32 bit Windows versions from W2K >, (some restrictions in Vista)
64 bit capable: No
Any special system requirements:
Portable version available: No
Additional software required : No

This category is maintained by volunteer editor George