XMeters is a lightweight free system monitoring tool that displays system resource usage right on the Windows taskbar. It monitors CPU, Storage, Network, and Memory stats in real-time and displays them on the taskbar to give you an overview of your most important system information at all time without getting in your way.
Download the tool from its website and install it. When you run XMeters the first time, it asks whether you want the toolbar shown on the taskbar. Click Yes to proceed.
The tool will then add the CPU, Storage, Network and Memory usage stats onto the taskbar by default. But you can disable/enable each of them by checking the check box for each category.
It’s also highly customizable. For each of the category, you can change the color, the type of graph, and the Refresh rate. For example, in CPU, you can select one of the three predefined graph types, Bar, Pie, or Text, change the color, and choose whether or not to display individual cores. By default, both options “Show Individual Cores” and “Separate User/Privileged Utilization” are enabled.
The Refresh Rate slider lets you adjust how often you want the usage stats to be updated. 3 seconds is the most frequent update interval you can set up with the free version. If you would like to see more frequently updated stats on your taskbar you will need to upgrade to the Pro version which costs $4.99.
You can even reorder the meters by simply dragging and dropping the tab items.
Left-clicking any of the stats module on the taskbar opens the Windows Task Manager. A right-click will open the tool’s Settings panel for customization.
It’s hard to terminate the tool once it’s launched since it’s displayed on the taskbar. So if you find it’s too much info getting in your way and gets you distracted, you can uncheck the categories in XMeters settings panel to close them.
Overall, XMeters is a small free monitoring tool that could be handy with real-time usage stats. The site doesn’t state clearly on the website which Windows versions are supported. I tested it on both Windows 10 Creators Update build 15063 and 16199. It worked flawlessly on the former but was quite buggy on the latter though. I also tried to run it on Windows 7 Pro but failed.