CPU Usage

Computer hardware components evolve at an alarming pace, but programs and video games keep becoming more and more demanding as well. As such, it's a good idea to keep an eye on resource usage to avoid damaging your computer altogether. For instance, CPU Usage can sit on the desktop and inform of CPU activity.

On the one hand, the application saves you the whole effort of going through a setup process, which means you can use it as a personal CPU monitor on other computers, directly from a thumb drive. What's more, runtime doesn't put much strain on resource consumption, and doesn't leave any traces inside registry entries.

The application starts monitoring your computer as soon as it's launched, and you can clearly see the info field showing CPU usage in percentage. The default update interval is a second, but you're free to change it. Note that the value is in milliseconds.

Some visual tweaks can be performed as well, even though aesthetics are not the main concern here, and the general layout is pretty intuitive. On the other hand, customization only means setting the opacity level, which needs to be a value between 1 and 255, with an additional option to make the window stay on top of all others to always have the info field in plain sight.

In case you need to monitor CPU activity frequently, or from the start, there's the possibility to make the application run with Windows. On the other hand, you can assign a custom hotkey command to the application's shortcut so you can just launch it when needed, regardless of your location.

Last but not least, checking the Set EnvVar checkbox creates a system-wide environment variable which is automatically kept up to date. You can identify it by the CPU_Usage tag if you need to remove it later on. It can be included in PHP or CGI scripts, but keeping it active can slightly increase CPU usage overall.

All things considered, we can state that CPU Usage comes with good intentions, but since it only provides monitoring capabilities for the CPU, you might be tempted to look for alternatives. Processor cores are read altogether, with no history tracker, or possibility to set alerts on high usage.