These handy monitors are pinned in your Taskbar and show the amount of resources being used. There are three meters for CPU utilization, Memory usage, and Disk IO.

You can configure the Update frequency and percentage of Red and Yellow states for each monitor. The CPU Meter shows the amount of processing power your computing tasks are taking up.

Memory Meter shows the amount of memory that is being used by the apps you’re running.

Disk I/O Meter measures the transfer of data from your hard drive to and from applications.

Right-click on a meter to get fast access to Task Manager and Resource Monitor. That allows you to get more detail on what’s taking up so many resources, and let’s kill the task or process.

Taskbar Meters are simple to use and don’t require installation, so you can carry them around on your flash drive to monitor different computers. The meters come in a zipped file and you can run them individually or together. They worked successfully on 32 & 64-bit versions of Windows 7. If you need a quick and easy way to keep track of these three vital system components, Task Meters will work great.

Download Taskbar Meters from CodePlex

Thanx to howtogeek for the news

Incoming search terms:

• windows 7 gadget disk io
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Memory operations per second with 4 GB of RAM

Memory operations per second with 8 GB of RAM

Jim Jardine, a Product Manager at Crucial memory, loaned me two DDR3 4 GB sticks of memory for my laptop.  They are the same speed as my old 2 GB sticks (8500), but I was surprised to see that the additional 4 GB of RAM did make a performance improvement.  I’ve seen how moving from 1 GB to 2 GB, or even 2 GB to 4 GB can improve performance, but I didn’t expect to see anything in the move from 4 GB to 8 GB, but it did!  The reason I wanted to move from 4 GB to 8 GB is for Hyper-V.  8 GB of RAM allows me to run more than one or two VMs on my laptop. 

Even though the speed of my 2 GB and 4 GB sticks are the same, could the Crucial memory really be faster than my original memory?  I’d like to think so <grin>.

Source: ts2blogs

Those affected by this issue will see the error text:  ”Attempted to read or write protected memory.  This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.”

Until Firefox releases an updated version with the fix, the only solution is to roll back your version of Firefox to 3.5.4 or earlier.  To do this you will have to:

1. Uninstall the 3.5.5 version of Firefox
2. Reinstall Firefox 3.5.4 from ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.5.4/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%203.5.4.exe

Once you’ve reinstalled you will need to turn off auto-updates for Firefox to ensure it doesn’t update back to 3.5.5. To disable the auto-update functionality in Firefox, follow these steps:

1. Disable your Internet connection so Firefox does not attempt to automatically update.
2. Start Firefox.
3. On the Tools menu, click Options.
4. Click Advanced.
5. Click the Update tab.
6. Disable auto-update.
   • Click to clear the Firefox check box OR
   • Click the radio button to “Ask me what I want to do” when updates to Firefox are found.
7. Click OK to apply the changes.
8. Re-enable your Internet connection and restart Firefox.

NOTE: The above is a temporary workaround as this will also stop you from picking up all further updates of Firefox.

The Firefox team is aware of the bug and has fixed it.  However, an updated version of Firefox containing the fix is not yet available.    We will update this blog when we have more information.

For those interested in the technical details:

Precise Firefox change that broke other applications:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=521750

Bug logged that fixes the issue caused by the above:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526586

MSDN article including note on problems with this implementation in XP and 2003:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/9w1sdazb(VS.80).aspx

Special thanx to Mr. Alex Moskwa for this information.!!!