Control Freak

I’m a sucker for all kinds of sidebars, monitors of system resources, and other gismos which help me see what’s going on in the system, how much memory is taken/available, which process is being too greedy, etc.

The other day I came across Rainmeter and Rainlendar—both excellent little tools. Rainmenter has some very nice skins with various performance meters. One of my favorite ones is Dash (shown here).

Also, for a long time I ran Desktop Sidebar (screenshot of my desktop, large PNG). It has a nice collection of "panels" for all kinds of occasions and a lot of skins to choose from.

Then, of course, there’s the gorgeous Konfabulator with its eye-candy widgets It is now my laptop’s permanent companion.

As of lately I’ve been playing with ObjectDock. What I like about it is that I can group together shortcuts to apps I use the most, rather than hunt them through the Start | All Programs menu.

Last but not least: Dell Inspiron 8x00 fan control utility deserves a special mention. My laptop was acting up engaging only one fan of the two, and this little tool helped get CPU cooling back on track.

Any of you have the same weakness for cool little tools, be it monitors, calendars, weather widgets, etc? Feel free to pitch both Mac and Windows favorites of yours.

I'm a big fan of Serence's Klipfolio. Basically its a widget aggregator - they have hundreds of different "klips" you can download that monitor the weather, rss feeds, atom feeds, and even ones that you can interact with (I have one that lets me test regular expressions.) I have one klip monitoring the RSS feed for your blog. It's pretty cool.

http://www.serence.com/site.php?action=ser_products,klipfolio