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Just looking for a simple widget that I can run on my desktop that shows the current memory usage. Any other performance statistics are okay, but I'm most interested in seeing what my RAM is at any point in time.
Here are a couple examples, It's fine to recommend them also. I'm just looking for something somebody has used and had good success with.
If you are OK with installing rainmeter, there are plenty of widgets that can display memory usage, plus other things like disk usage or temperature. I'm pretty sure the default skin comes with a memory usage widget, but if I'm wrong, you can find one from the community (see http://rainmeter.net/discover)
I liked rainmeter because there were a whole bunch of really beautiful skins out there that made the windows desktop more interesting, plus it can give you some power user features, like memory usage.
The Sysinternals Process Explorer allows you to view a lot of data including having a view just for memory usage, when minimised it displays a graph on the taskbar icon and if you right click on that and select system information you get:
It is a free tool from the Microsoft site.
If you select Options, Tray Icons, Physical Memory History you get a tray icon with a graph of physical memory usage that you can hover over to get the numbers.
Odds are, you probably have a lightweight Gadget for displaying RAM that came with your machine.
Find your gadgets menu by right clicking anywhere on the desktop or going to the Control Panel > Desktop Gadgets.
It should pull up this menu:
Then just add the gadget, which should look like this:
If you want to tweak it and you're familiar with some coding, you can go to
C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\
And take a copy of the CPU.Gadget and make adjustments as necessary.
Here's a getting started on gadgets guide from stack overflow
