Placing The CPU Meter In The System Tray In XP

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
by Diana Huggins

Windows Task Manager has a built in CPU Meter that lets you easily monitor the Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage on your computer. Normally you would have to open Task Manager to monitor your computer’s CPU. As an alternative though, you can place an icon for the CPU meter in your system tray. Every time you reboot, regardless of which user is currently logged on to the computer, the CPU Meter will appear in the System Tray.

To add the CPU Meter to the System Tray in XP:

Perform a search on your computer and locate TASKMAN.exe
Right click the application, point to Send To, and click Desktop (create shortcut).
Right click the shortcut on your desktop. From the Shortcut tab, change the Run: option to Minimized.
Click OK.
Right click the shortcut and click Cut.
Right click the Start Menu and click Open All Users. Open the Programs\Startup folder and paste the shortcut.
Right click the Taskbar and click Task Manager.
From the Options menu, place a check beside Minimize on use and Hide when minimized.
Minimize the Windows Task Manager dialog box.
An icon in your system tray will now appear for the CPU Meter.

6 Comments

Jacques Marcille

December 5th, 2007
at 7:50am

Hi,
I have XP Pro sp2 installed on my machine. I tried following your recipe to add the internal XP cpu meter to the tray, but failed at Step3.

When I right click on the shortcut to Taskman.exe created on my desktop, there is no ‘Shortcut tab’ in the menu that opens up. So I cannot change the Run option to Minimized.

What did I fail to understand?

Thanks

frank bailey

December 20th, 2007
at 6:04am

help! after recently uninstalling/reinstalling my ati driver -and subsequently having to reset screen resolution etc, i now have 2TINY rows of icons in my SYSTEM TRAY -instead of just 1 row of decent sized icons.

There are only 7 or 8 icons ever in there. resolution is now 1280×1024 -as it was before the ati problem.

These small icons can hardly be seen, let alone selected!

Anybody know what i have done to it now? Or how i can put it right?
Cheers.

frank bailey

December 20th, 2007
at 6:07am

@Jacques Marcille -if you still haven’t sussed it, you need to right click your Taskman shortcut icon (as before) then select PROPERTIES. Then you will find the shortcut tab. (Mind i only use the Home XP, not Pro.)

Vamshi

February 25th, 2008
at 5:17pm

I think you mean taskmgr.exe instead of taskman.exe.

emeacham

March 9th, 2008
at 10:32am

Vamshi is right - taskmgr.exe > taskman.exe

jeff

June 4th, 2008
at 4:17am

the taskmanager is actually quite memory-consuming.
this method is not recommended if your PCs is laggy.
try some 3rd party software instead of this.
“Better Memory Meter 1.10″ is quite good. google it, it’s freeware.

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