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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware, Windows x64

Add CPU and memory meters to your Windows 7 taskbar

Windowsby Lee Mathews Oct 29th 2009

I'm not the biggest Twitter fan, but let's face it: people sometimes share really useful information in their 140-character updates.

Scott Hanselman (@shanselman), for example, tipped users about a slick addition to your Windows 7 taskbar that you'll find over at Codeplex called Taskbar Meters.

Download developer Jeff Key's .zip file and extract the contents to a folder on your hard drive. Inside you'll find two executables - one for CPU and one for memory. Launch them, and the result is what you see in the screenshot.

The meters make use of the Windows 7 taskbar's progress indicator kung fu. Using the sliders in the ultra-simple options screens you can choose the update frequency and set at what percentage of utilization your indicators switch from green to yellow and then to red. Pin 'em to your taskbar and you've got a simple, Win7-friendly heads up display of your PC's vitals.

They're jumplist enabled as well, though right-clicking only gives you access to task manager (which you've always had by right-clicking the taskbar anyway) and the Windows Resource Monitor.

Each meter uses about 18Mb of ram and worked for me under both 32 and 64-bit builds of Windows 7.

Tags: cpu, memory, processor, ram, shell-enhancement, superbar, taskbar, windows 7, windows-7, windows7

Filed under: Internet, Social Software, Beta

Digsby multi-protocol chat client seriously cuts RAM usage

by Brad Linder Aug 12th 2008

Digsby Alpha
Digsby is probably one of the coolest free Windows applications released in recent memory. The utility is like Pidgin mashed up with Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, and it has email notifiers for Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail as well as other services thrown in for good measure. There's just one problem: Digsby is a major resource hog.

Early builds of Digsby have been known to eat over 100MB of memory. If you've got 4GB of RAM, that might not seem like much. But if you have an older PC with 1GB or less, there's no reason that a messenging program should eat up 10% or more of your memory.

A few days ago, Digsby pushed out a new alpha release that addresses the memory issue. I find that the alpha version tends to hover around 30MB of memory use, and according to the developers, it shouldn't go much higher than 50MB even if you register a ton of email and social networking accounts.

The new version also features other performance enhancements, and improvements that will attempt to help you get around firewalls and proxy servers if necessary. There's also a new crash reporter.

Keep in mind, the latest version of Digsby is still in alpha, which means there are likely plenty of bugs to be worked out. Normally I wouldn't recommend replacing stable software with an alpha. But if you've been frustrated with Digsby's high resource usage in the past, you should really check out the latest version. Just make sure to backup your settings first.

Tags: alpha, digsby, instant-messenger, memory, RAM, resources

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, E-mail, Social Software, Beta

Digsby comes a long way in one week, still a memory hog

by Brad Linder Feb 13th 2008

Digsby proxy settings
Just a week after Digsby widened its private beta by giving away 5,000 invites to Download Squad readers, the development team has already issued 4 new builds of the chat, email, and social networking client. Probably the most significant new feature is support for proxy settings to help users get around corporate firewalls.

There are a ton of other bug fixes and minor new features as well, including:
  • A fix for "connection lost" issue when logging in
  • A fix for MSN Messenger IMs not being sent
  • A fix for Digsby getting stuck while loading skins during the login
  • A fix for freezes while logging into Yahoo! Messenger
  • Ctrl + Backapsace now deletes one word at a time in the input box
If you already have a Digsby account, you can either download the latest client from the Digsby home page or just fire up Digsby on your PC if it's already installed. The client will download all the updates automatically. While the lack of proxy support was one of the main complaints we heard from users last week, there's one other issue we'd love to see Digsby work on: The program's large memory footprint. Digsby can easily use 70MB or more at launch. Considering how many functions the service has, that might not seem like a lot, but similar applications like Pidgin use just a small fraction of the RAM that Digsby does.

Tags: chat, digsby, e-mail, IM, memory, notifier, proxy, RAM

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Instant Memory Cleaner frees up your precious RAM

Windowsby Simon Kerbel Feb 7th 2008

If you covet your RAM like Gollum coveted the ring, then Instant Memory Cleaner should be one of the tools in your toolbox.

Designed for XP and Vista, Instant Memory Cleaner frees up your memory by forcing pages out of physical memory and reducing the size of running processes' working sets to a minimum.

The program sits in your Windows Taskbar; when clicked, it pops up a small and simple interface. There's a button to show you real time memory usage (with stats for physical memory, pagefile, and virtual memory), another to click for help, and one that will initialize the memory freeing process.

Short, sweet, and now you know it complete.

Instant Memory Cleaner is a free download for XP and Vista.

Tags: instant memory cleaner, InstantMemoryCleaner, memory, RAM

Filed under: Mozilla

Mozilla aims to reduce Firefox memory usage

by Brad Linder Nov 12th 2007

Firefox memoryWhile Firefox enthusiasts swear that the web browser is the best invention since sliced bread or the scientific calculator, there's no question that Firefox can be a bit of a memory hog. When you load your first window, the browser zips along smoothly. But open a few more tabs, do a little navigating back and forth, and before you know it Firefox is eating up half of your system's RAM.

Mozilla has long insisted that this isn't a "memory leak" bug, per se, but rather a way to ensure that Firefox opens pages at blazing fast speeds. That's because an awful lot of information is kept in cache.

But bug or no bug, as Mozilla tries to figure out how to cram Firefox onto mobile phones, 200MB+ memory requirements just aren't going to cut it. Mozilla developer Stuart Parmenter has posted an interesting analysis of Firefox memory use on his blog. And Mozilla board member Christopher Blizzard suggests that over the next few months, we'll see developers tackling the memory use issue a bit more aggressively.

Of course, it's possible that reducing memory use will also reduce performance, so we may eventually see a version of Firefox with a smaller memory footprint for mobile devices, with a fuller-fledged version for desktop use.

[via TechBlog]

Tags: firefox, memory, memory-leak, mobile, ram

Filed under: Office, Productivity, OpenOffice.org, Open Source

How to speed up OpenOffice

by Brad Linder Aug 18th 2007

OpenOffice speed tweak
From the "if we really thought about it we would have been able to figure this out on our own" department comes a handy tip for speeding up OpenOffice.org -- by increasing its memory use.

The open source Microsoft Office alternative is great if you're looking for a low cost word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. But it takes so long to load up, especially if you don't enable the quick start application.

Here's how to cut down OpenOffice.org's startup time:
  1. Start OpenOffice (it doesn't matter which application you load, Calc, Impress, or Writer will all work)
  2. Click Tools>Options
  3. Select Java menu and uncheck "Use a Java runtime environment"
  4. Select the Memory Tab and change the following options:
  • Number of steps: 30
  • Use for Open Office: 128
  • Memory per Object: 20
  • Number of Objects: 20
Next time you start an OpenOffice.org application it should open much more quickly. But it will also eat up more memory. If you have an older computer with less than 1GB of RAM, you might want to just live with a slow load time. Or buy more memory.

[via gHacks]

Tags: memory, openoffice.org, ram, speed, tips

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

DriveGLEAM - monitor HDD activity

Windowsby Jason Clarke Aug 16th 2006

DriveGLEAMSometimes you want to know exactly what is going on with your hard drive. If that's the case, you'll want to try DriveGLEAM. It can monitor physical drives as well as partitions for activity, and report how much free space is left. All of this is done via system tray icons. DriveGLEAM is primarily a hard drive monitoring utility, but also has a few other tricks up its sleeve, like monitoring available system RAM and virtual RAM, as well as CPU load.

DriveGLEAM tray icons

For the ambitious folks, DriveGLEAM also offers an odd feature of sending the hard drive's status to the parallel port so that physical LEDs can be wired to flash appropriately. Personally this is a bit of overkill (seeing the drive status in my system tray is good enough for me), but I can imagine that there are those of you out there for whom this would make a great mod.

Tags: CPU, drive monitoring, DriveGLEAM, DriveMonitoring, hard drive, HardDrive, RAM

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Optimize Windows' memory usage with Cacheman

Windowsby Jordan Running Feb 2nd 2006

CachemanAs I've mentioned in previous posts, for the number of apps I tend to run concurrently, my system is starved for RAM. Yes, I know this could be easily remedied, but until I get around to it I'm really enjoying Cacheman, a Windows app from Outer Technologies that's "designed to improve the performance of your computer by optimizing the disk cache, memory and a number of other settings." In addition to helping you tweak some settings to give your computer a little boost, Cacheman also has a great memory recovery mode that'll monitor your computer's memory use and, when it's running low, shuffle things around in RAM and free up anywhere from (in my experience) 10-50MB of physical memory. For that feature alone Cacheman is worth it's weight in gold, but fortunately for us software doesn't weigh anything and Cacheman is free.

Tags: cache, cacheman, memory, optimize, ram, windows

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