What's Going On?: A One-Stop Spot for Vital System Stats

Windows comes packaged with many tools to find details about the current state of your system. There's Task Manager for discovering the processes that are using your CPU, Resource Monitor for investigating your disk activity, and Explorer for showing the total usage of all your drives. Wouldn't it be useful to have these stats all together in one handy, attractive application?

What's Going On? is a system utility that gives you a one-stop spot for all your system's vital stats. In one window you can find out:

• Which processes are accessing your hard drive

• Which processes are consuming the most CPU resources

• How full your hard drives are

• The last time your computer was booted and how long it's been running

• The last time your computer was shut down

• Your external IP address

• Total CPU usage and CPU usage per processor

• The percentage or actual amount of physical or virtual memory used

• The state of your Internet connection by pinging a remote server

When you launch the program for the first time you'll see a window like this:

By default the following measures are displayed:

Uptime — how long your system has been running

Boot time — the date and time your system was last started

External IP — the IP address that other computers around the world see you as

CPU Usage — the percentage of CPU usage being used by all your CPUs

CPU Usage Per Processor — the percentage of CPU usage for each processor. For example, a dual-core processor would display two readings

Physical Memory % Usage — the percentage of physical memory currently being used

Virtual Memory % Usage — the percentage of virtual memory currently being used

Top CPU Consuming Processes — displays the two processes that are using the most CPU resources. This can be altered to display up to 10 processes

Drive Usage — shows all of your hard drives and how much space is being used on each one. The bar graph is color coded: Green means plenty of space, yellow means that a drive is filling up, and red means that it's close to capacity.

Top Disk Consuming Processes — displays the top two processes accessing the hard drives the most. This can be altered to display up to 10 processes. (full Story)