|
WinPulse by aKa |
WinPulse Home Page (Broken at the moment) |
WinPulse is an information utility which will give you the stats on some of your computers most important parts. Plus, a few extras to boot!! :) |
|
WinPulse by aKa Since everyone has been calling recent times the "information age", it would be obvious to assume that everyone should have a utility loaded on their hard drive that will give them the information they need about their computer. WinPulse gathers all of that info and presents it to you in a nice, neat package. It also contains a few nice features which will help you get the most out of your pc. Platform........ Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000 Downloading........ Size zipped: 800k (.zip file) Size Installed: 1.8 megs Most of the links connected to other freeware sites are broken. For downloading, I have placed the file in one of my own archive areas until I find the proper link to the web site. However, download speed may suffer a bit because of this. Web Site.......... As of this writing, I can not find the web site as listed on most of the freeware providers or the program itself. If I come across it, I will post it on a future update. Installation.......... There is no installation utility being used presently for WinPulse so this program must be installed manually. Find your favorite file manager and make a directory called "WinPulse" in your "Program Files" directory (just a suggestion!), click on the .zip file that you've downloaded and open it up into that directory. Then, make a shortcut on your screen to use it or, click on the .exe program file from your file manager and set it to start with the operating system (I'll get to that in a bit!), then reboot! Help Files.......... The help file is an html document which should display on your default internet browser. It is filled with instruction, directions, helpful hints, a F.A.Q., and screen images which will guide you through the program. It's complete with shortcuts and is very easy to read. Interface........... WinPulse shows in the taskbar as a small, two paneled icon which displays the cpu usage on the fly. Opening the program shows a window with many "speeders" on it (according to the author, "speeders" stands for speedometers). These gauge bars show the information for each area in a configurable color representing a percentage. Here's a pic of my setup of WinPulse:
The areas showing are for my mounted drives, cpu usage, ram, swap file, wm, usr, gdi, plus there are adjustment slides for audio and wav output, and to round it off, the bottom has the current time and the time the computer has been running in my current session. Of course, all of these are configurable as WinPluse breaks all of these down into "Sentinels". Right clicking on each area will give you a menu where you can choose "designer" and change the way your entire window looks. Here's a pic of the "designer" window:
Features........... WinPulse gives you a mega amount of information starting at the tray icon, to all of the "speeders" that are available in the program. First, right clicking on the window will bring up the menu where you can click "Options". This is where you can set WinPulse to start when your OS starts. There are other selections too including "Transparent" (this is not usable on a Win95 or clone system), background color, refresh speeds, etc. Here's a pic of the options window:
As mentioned, each area of the WinPulse window is made up of "sentinels" which display different aspects of your computer system, separating them into different categories . The drive sentinel will display the percentage of used space on each mounted drive, including ram drives, zip, cd, hard drives, etc. The CPU Sentinel will display the percentage of usage in the cpu's which have been installed on your computer, supporting up to 32 (!) separate processors. The gauge in the icon bar shows the usage for the first 2 cpu's! The Memory Sentinel shows the percentage of memory usage, including RAM, swap, and virtual memory. If you right click on the window and select "free mem", WinPulse will actually free up your memory, showing a speeder while it's doing its duty, then vanishing when finished. A nice added feature! The FSR Sentinel (free system resources) will display your win 9X system resources including the Graphics Device Interface and the User Resources. The Audio Sentinel gives you two slider bars to adjust your audio output and your wav output. The System Sentinel has information on time, OS, screen resolution, how long the system has been live, plus more! Finally there is the Net Sentinel which allows you to setup the monitoring of "pings" when you are online. For an information program, this little thing has lots to offer. Problems......... None so far! It seems to be a rather stable little info utility. Hopefully, their web site will be back up soon! The program's lack of install utility may make it seem "avoidable" to some people. This may change with a future update. As the current WinPulse program was released just one week prior to this review, I'm assuming that the author is currently supporting this program. Closing......... I'm going to be keeping this on my system as I've found it extremely handy at times. Now, I don't have to go digging around my system to find out certain bits of info, I just click WinPulse!
Enjoy Buzzy J
|
Back to Buzzy's StallWall..............
