Filed under: Utilities, Windows
Add volume and battery meters (and more!) to your Windows 7 superbar
by Lee Mathews Mar 8th 2010 at 5:00PM
We've covered a few Windows 7 friendly status indicators before -- like these two for monitoring your CPU and memory utilization. Another developer decided to have a go at his own version, and the results are pretty slick.
Five meters are available: power, volume, disk, CPU, and memory. The meters are very configurable, with options for custom colors, overlays, and whether or not to launch them at startup. Each one uses about 6MB of memory and no install is required -- just drop the .exe files somewhere on your hard drive and fire 'em up.
While I'm not one to keep a constant eye on things like CPU, ram, and diskspace (my Spider Sense usually kicks in when there's a problem on one of those fronts), the volume and battery indicators are handy. I especially like the nice, obvious mute indicator -- which leaves no doubt as to whether or not unwanted system sounds are going to disturb anyone nearby.
You can download the superbar meters from the developer's website.
[via The Windows Club]
Five meters are available: power, volume, disk, CPU, and memory. The meters are very configurable, with options for custom colors, overlays, and whether or not to launch them at startup. Each one uses about 6MB of memory and no install is required -- just drop the .exe files somewhere on your hard drive and fire 'em up.
While I'm not one to keep a constant eye on things like CPU, ram, and diskspace (my Spider Sense usually kicks in when there's a problem on one of those fronts), the volume and battery indicators are handy. I especially like the nice, obvious mute indicator -- which leaves no doubt as to whether or not unwanted system sounds are going to disturb anyone nearby.
You can download the superbar meters from the developer's website.
[via The Windows Club]
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Each animal can do different things; the butterfly can obviously fly, but if it encounters a frog, the frog eats it, and you have to start over again. There's also a fox that runs fast and leaps far, but it eats any rabbits that cross its path. That means that, if you may need to be a rabbit later on, you need to take that into account ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Annoying Poster said 5:26PM on 3-08-2010
this is completely useless, all of these monitors are built into the windows tray, and for CPU/RAM there is a built in desktop gadget
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Lee Mathews said 5:34PM on 3-08-2010
I'm not sure I understand your logic. So because there's a sidebar gadget for CPU/ram, this is useless? What if I don't like gadgets?
Because volume is in the system tray this is useless? How do I make the volume indicator giant and red when it's muted like I can with these?
Useless "to you" DNE useless.
SleepingPanda said 1:28AM on 3-09-2010
While I'm usually inclined to agree with DLS on stuff like this, I can understand what he meant. I can't see a practical use for this other than for those color features(especially with other shortcut apps like 3RVX). That still doesn't justify it enough, though (at least for me, it doesn't!).
mer2329 said 6:07PM on 3-08-2010
i recommend battery bar instead of using the super bar to monitor your battery
http://osirisdevelopment.com/BatteryBar/index.html
it gives more info than the standard windows battery monitor and slightly more info than the one you wrote about
it has a free and pro edition
the pro edition is currently on sale with a choose your price (the ranges are $1-$2 for 1 year, $3-$5 for 2 year and $6-$10 for lifetime)
super bar battery is a little too easy to close and it isn't disabling windows aero when i switch to battery, it takes to much space on my task bar as i have it set to never combine and show labels now battery bar is about 1/2 the length of one of the application bar/icon (sorry i don't know the name of those) although if you are using a task bar with multiple layers it will increase its height to fit all the rows
honestly i prefer battery bar but it is up to the individual to decide on what they want to use
also the page to download the super bar monitors is not in English so if you don't read German you will need to use an online translator
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Brian! said 12:29AM on 3-09-2010
I wonder what code is in there to take up 6 megs each. Sure, in this day and age people have tons of room to play with, but for a battery meter? I am sure there are some general libraries hanging out in there containing unnecessary stuff. I'd expect like 500k each or something very light.
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SleepingPanda said 1:22AM on 3-09-2010
Spammers are getting ridiculously smart nowadays. Actually posting something somewhat relevant to the post.
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ajay said 2:47PM on 3-09-2010
yeah nice tips i heard some time before about this and want to make web page for this but i just forgot i have some more information on others tips regarding to windows 7 where you can change password log on screen images and some more cool stuffs.
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