Whenever some program seems to be frozen (it happens with Firefox sometimes), I launch the Process Explorer or the Task Manager to see if the CPU is being hogged by some process. I also check other system resources like the disk access and the RAM status. But when the CPU of your PC is already at 99% use, it becomes a little hard to open the Task Manager or any other program. But you do not have to open these programs to check the system stats if you are using XMeters – a free program that displays all the vital system stats right in the taskbar.
When you launch XMeters after the installation, it asks you if you want to display the XMeters toolbar in the Windows taskbar. You should choose “Yes” for this query. After this you will instantly see your computer’s CPU usage, memory and hard drive usage, and shows data transfer on the web (number of bytes for the data uploaded and downloaded).
In the options, you can change how this data is being displayed in the taskbar and how often it is updated. You can choose the bar, pie or text style for displaying this data. No matter which mode you choose, all of this data is displayed dynamically – it changes with the altering system status. In other words, it is the real-time data that is being shown. But you can choose the time interval for updating this data from anywhere between 3 seconds to 10 seconds. If you want to data to be updated even faster, then you will have to purchase the commercial version of this software.
Conclusion: XMeters is a very useful application to stay aware of your PC’s current stats like the CPU use, RAM use, storage usage and also the data transfer when you are connected to the internet.
You can download XMeters from https://entropy6.com/xmeters/.