I now have spent from several days to several months with an accumulation of six different Yahoo Widgets (all free, all amazing tools, all totally reliable) that I want to recommend to all you dudes and dudettes who are into meters, gauges and all the rest of that visual eye-candy stuff and who are slaving away as volunteers in the WCG.

These are very accurate wee devices you can size (and even reshape from squares to rectangles) to your liking, color to your liking and stack in a corner of your desk top so you can actually SEE what your PC is doing while processing a work unit for WCG.

These are netstat, Sys Monitor, CPU Monitor, Net Monitor, Disc Monitor and systemBlox. You can get them from Yahoo in their Widgets service which lists the roughly 3000 different types they have. Just enter each of the above names in the left-hand window on the Widget homepage, then download and install. (You must first install the Widget Engine--which is about 20meg, I think.) The entire process for each Widget takes about 30 seconds and some 150K of memory and they don't eat your processing time.

All Widgets are benchtested in advance of release by the Yahoo IT cats and while there is no Yahoo guarantee about bugginess, I assure you that you can trust these things. I have about 40 of them for various reasons. (You CAN put these things on what Yahoo calls the "Heads Up Display" which is like having a second desktop that you can pop into view at will--the net result being that your regular desktop is left untouched!)

There is some duplication of process being reported among this list of suggested Widgets but some are from different developers and I always like to double-check results and figure that one developer may reveal weak reporting in the Widget from another. (Comes from being an old newspaper editor. Never ever trust one source--always get a second in agreement, or don't publish the story. Dan Rather should have known this, you know, since it is so basic.) So far, they are all with a few percenages of each other. --Very reassuring!!!

netstat provides you current up- and down-load speeds and the total up and down totals for the current day plus a dynamic/real-time chart of both processes.

Sys Monitor provides you a huge array of data choices (many of which are duplicated by the other Widgets I'm recommending) but they are all in dynamic bar charts and stated percentages that tell you currently what is happening but the bars don't give you the sense of "trends" that the chart approach does.

Net Monitor runs two dynamic charts in mirror form in one chart (the zero-base is the same for both at your choice of sampled data at 1 to 15 second intervals of your up- and down-load activities.

Disc Monitor runs two dynamic charts in mirror form in one chart (the zero-base line is the same for both) of your PC's total simultaneous read and write processes.

CPU Monitor merges two charts--user use of CPU time and "machine" use of CPU time. The two are interfaces so that the unoccupied part of the chart reveals the unused CPU time available at each measured point in time.

There is only one download necessary for systemBlox but there are about 12 different application choices you can set up inside its "preferences". I use five of these in a row under the stack of the above. Each is a "rolling dial" percentage of what you want to measure.

Again, fully resizable, change the colors however you wish. I have focused on muted dark green and dark orange in all since those are the colors in netstat and its colors cannot be changed. And you can really get these things small. The systemBlox I have are about half the size of a first-class stamp. The others range in size from that up to a commemorative stamp (shin-plasterer) size, all ready size-references if you are into stamp-collecting.

Hint--netstat's graph runs from right to left, so I set all my others to do that as well, with the exception of the systemBlox, which only "roll" up and down.

So, there's my good deed for the day. You, too, can now watch the WCG work unit being processed by your computer and even note the exact instance the upload begins and the next download commences.

--Really funky eye-candy, dudes and dudettes! And these Widgets actually serve a good purpose in letting you know just what that box really is doing while you listen to the grinding and whirling sounds. (And also helps you manage your PC more effectively.)

Enjoy!

Jim Liddell
"Getting into a two-gallon pot of home-made TexMex chili today. --Eat your hearts out!"