If you want to see what is happening in terms of CPU usage or disk access then you can use the Task Manager tool that is built inside the Windows operating system. From the “Performance” section of the Task Manager, you can check the CPU usage, RAM usage, disk usage and the network usage. But if you want much more graphical real-time data related to your computer’s performance then you can try free SysGauge software.
SysGauge is a free performance monitoring tool for Windows that allows you to monitor the CPU usage, memory usage, network transfer rate, operating system performance, the running processes, file system performance, USB performance, disk space usage, disk read/write activity and the disk read/write transfer rate for all kinds of disks installed in your PC.
In the SysGauge window, you can select one of the counters from the list and then view the graphical real-time data related to that counter. For example, if you select CPU Usage from the list, it will show an analog meter with the current CPU usage percentage. On the right side a graph will be shown with the real-time CPU usage per second for the last minute.
You can set SysGauge to alert you when any of these counters reaches a certain limit. For this, you can right-click on any of the counters from the list and choose to Edit Counter. In the window that opens you can set the limits for the counter and the action that should be taken when such a limit is crossed. Among the actions, you can choose to play a notification sound, send an email to you, shutdown your PC or restart your PC.
You can also export the current system performance report to a file. This can be done by clicking on the Save button in the toolbar. The report can be exported in three modes – full report, monitoring history only or a short summary report. The report can be exported in form of PDF, TXT, CSV, XML, HTML and Excel documents.
Conclusion: SysGauge displays detailed information about the performance of your Windows PC. It could be useful when analyzing a hardware or software related issue in your PC. You can save the performance report to a file in many popular file formats.
You can download SysGauge from http://www.sysgauge.com/.