Remember those sidebars that first appeared in Windows Vista and you could add many gadgets to them like the weather widget or the analog clock widget? Yes, those sidebars and all those widgets are long dead and were removed in Windows 10, but you can still use a software called Sidebar Diagnostics to display something similar on your Windows desktop.
Sidebar Diagnostics is an open-source program that installs a simple sidebar towards the right-side of the screen. It displays the current time, CPU name, CPU temperature, loads on various CPU cores, total load on the CPU, RAM usage, GPU load, hard disk drives, drive capacities and the free space on all the partitions. It also displays the network status – local IP address, download and upload speeds.
You can hover the mouse pointer over the sidebar to see a small cogwheel clicking on which will open the sidebar settings window. In this window, you can choose which of the hardware parts are to be monitored and their status to be displayed in the sidebar – CPU, RAM, GPU, Drives and Network.
Sidebar Diagnostics also installs an icon in the notification area of Windows desktop. You can right-click on this icon to find options like hiding the sidebar, showing the sidebar, reload the sidebar, update it or open the settings. You can also open the graph that displays the values of different items like the CPU temperature, CPU load on various cores and total CPU load.
If your computer is slowing down due to a recent software installation or hardware replacement, then Sidebar Diagnostics can be very useful to view the real-time status of various hardware components. It not only monitors these values for hardware components, but it can also display an alert when some values cross a specific threshold level.
You can download Sidebar Diagnostics from https://github.com/ArcadeRenegade/SidebarDiagnostics/releases.