Windows Gadgets to Monitor Your Network PCs

Those of you looking for some effective and free utilities to monitor your the PCs at your company will find a variety of helpful programs at a website called AddGadget.com. I recently bumped into this site when I was searching for a tool to track my network connection and thought the full array of software on the site could prove handy to IT pros.

AddGadget.com offers different utilities that can monitor the performance of a computer’s CPU, hard drives, and network connections. As such, you can run them on any servers that you directly support or on any client computers when you’re trying to diagnose a particular problem.

Each tool on the site is a Windows gadget, which means it appears on your desktop as a module that you can position around your screen and manage through the Desktop Gadget Gallery. The programs at AddGadget can also be found at Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Windows Live Gallery, a collection of hundreds of gadgets and other tools that you can run on a Windows desktop.

Here’s a quick look at the different utilities at AddGadget.com:

CPU Usage – This gadget monitors your CPU cycles to see how great a percentage of the processor is being used. It also can track memory to show you how much RAM (News - Alert) is currently being consumed. For these reasons, it can be a helpful tool if you’re trying to track down a specific application that’s chewing up an excessive amount of CPU cycles or memory.

Network Meter – As its name implies, this gadget can monitor the performance of your network connection and other helpful tidbits. It shows your download and upload speeds and offers links to external tools that can run a speed test and look up information on your IP address. Network Meter also displays both your internal and external IP addresses, handy for those of you working behind a firewall. Network Meter replaces AddGadget’s old Wireless Network Meter and Wired Network Meter tools, which were previously two separate programs.

Drives Meter – This gadget displays the overall capacity of your hard drive along with used and free space. It can also display the speed of the drive as it reads and writes data.

Finally, AddGadget offers a couple of other handy tools. Control System lets you reboot, shut down, log off, and hibernate your PC from one single tiny control panel. And World Clock displays the time and with the background of a flag from any of 37 different countries.

Though all the tools at AddGadget are free, you can donate money to the site via PayPal (News - Alert) if you find the programs of value. I’ve found them all useful for keeping track of the performance on my PCs and think they could be equally helpful to any of you IT pros out there.