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I've been using WindirStat for quite some time and am amazed by how efficiently and clearly it shows which content takes up space on my computer.

enter image description here

The rectangles are grouped by folder and extension. You can always see where all the space on the HDD went.

My question is: is there similar software for monitoring CPU and RAM usage? I feel like my machine is running slower and slower, and I'd like to see which processes hog up the resources (or whether there's less resources to hog).

Stas Bichenko
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2 Answers2

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Original Answer (See the section below for a more comprehensive solution.)

You have Windows Task Manager, which is built into Microsoft Windows itself.

[MediaWiki screenshot of Windows Task Manager]

From Wikipedia, the article Windows Task Manager (edit 19:04, 17 September 2012)‎:

Windows Task Manager is a task manager application included with the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems that provides detailed information about computer performance and running applications, processes and CPU usage, commit charge and memory information, network activity and statistics, logged-in users, and system services. The Task Manager can also be used to set process priorities, processor affinity, forcibly terminate processes, and shut down, restart, hibernate or log off from Windows.

Alternative Answer (requested by OP)

Process Explorer is like Windows Task Manager, but it has more features. Since you are looking for "a more detailed view", consider Process Explorer.

You can download it by clicking here.

[MediaWiki screenshot of Process Explorer]

From Wikipedia, the article Process Explorer (edit 21:39, 4 October 2012)‎:

Process Explorer is a system monitoring and examination utility. It provides the functionality of Windows Task Manager along with a rich set of features for collecting information about processes running on the user's system. It can be used as the first step in debugging software or system problems.

Community
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Deltik
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The only thing I've found which gives a graphical visualisation of RAM usage (similar to how WinDirStat does for disk usage) is the perl script on this blog post which takes the output of tasklist and feeds it into a Google Charts Treemap.

I had to fix a few things to get it working and have published a modified version as MemTreeMap.

sparrowt
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