Forget about all those expensive complicated system and performance monitoring software that gives you whole load of information which you don’t understand at all! Sometimes I just want a small simple tool that sits on my desktop to display my memory usage, CPU usage, network traffic and disk activity easily at a glance. Meaning when you look at it, immediately you’ll know what is slowing down your system.
Here’s a free software that’s rather…. “cute” in monitoring and displaying your system performance.
MimarSinan Rubber Ducky System Monitor is a free performance monitoring software that has a small aquarium that sits above your system tray. Each elements of the aquarium represent a system information.
Here are the meanings of each elements on Rubber Ducky.
Water Level – The water level indicates RAM (computer memory) usage. If the water level is too high, the duck will drown. When you open too many applications, your computer memory starts filling up. If the duck is drowning, close some running applications to improve performance.
Water Color – The water color indicates SWAP file usage. If the water color is muddy, the computer is using too much swap space. The computer starts using the SWAP file when it is running low on free memory. If the water color is too dark, close some of your memory intensive applications.
Fish – Fish indicate NETWORK traffic (such as Internet activity). When you have fish swimming, your computer is sending/receiving data. Fish moving from right to left indicate inbound traffic (such as downloads). Network traffic does not directly impact system performance.
Plants – Plans indicate HARD DISK activity. When the plans are waving, your computer is writing data to the hard disk. Almost all programs write to the hard disk, but some more often than the others. If there is too mcuh hard disk activity, your system may slow down.
Bubbles – Bubbles indicate CPU activity. As your programs use more computing power, more bubbles appear. If there are too many bubbles, one of your programs is using too much CPU. If the CPU usage is always high, it may slow down or destabilize the system.
All this while I felt that my laptop is slow but it’s bearable. When I ran Rubber Ducky, I saw that the duck was upside down and drowning due to the water level is too high. High water level = High RAM usage. My laptop has 512MB ram and running Windows XP. I think it’s time to upgrade to either 1GB or 2GB depending on my budget. See, sometimes we pay more attention to simple freewares rather than expensive sharewares.