Yes, the Windows Task Manager has helped us for years to keep a close eye on the processor's behavior. Yes, it is quite annoying to have to open it every time, or settle for a small icon in the system tray. And yes, there are much more practical solutions like CPUMon, which offers options such as changing the size of the graphs, enabling a transparency mode for its main window, and modifying the way it presents data.
Monitoring the load on the processor is not only a useful detail to check its stability in overclocking situations, but also to detect when a process begins to behave erratically. This is something I have seen very frequently in Firefox. The browser starts to create “spikes” of percentage in one or more cores, and the solution ends up being nothing more than closing the main process, only to open it again. This kind of “active monitoring” has existed for a long time. If memory serves, an official Windows Vista gadget allowed us to do exactly that, but the mere memory of the “sidebar” hurts us body and soul, so the ideal is to use something more efficient and lightweight.
The answer is CPUMon. Processor frequency, activity indicator, memory in use, everything is there. In fact, I think we don't need anything else, but its creator did a great job. CPUMon supports visual details like transparency and alpha blending, so the main window stays visible even when we work on other applications (this can be disabled). It provides several parameters to change the background, text and graphics colors, as well as the window size and its location (I personally prefer bottom-right, right above the clock). The refresh rate is about 500 milliseconds, but if you want you can force CPUMon to go faster or slower. All settings are real-time, except keeping the window on top.
Compact, portable, flexible... I think other programs with the same function could learn a thing or two from CPUMon. Its more advanced actions are only available in the Pro edition, but the Lite version is completely free for personal use. Try it.
