Most computer users like to keep a close eye on the performance of their systems and try to optimize them in order to get the best out of their PC or laptop. The default tools provided by the Windows OS are often insufficient to supervise each running process or service, to diagnose running applications and, perhaps more important, to do all that from a single interface. For this undertaking dedicated utilities have been developed and they are meant to show, with different detailing, the exact status of several system components and resources.

As in most cases, the choice one has to make is between paid or free software depending on the needs of each user and the functionality provided by such a utility. Among the freebies that are built for the job mentioned above, there is Moo0 SystemMonitor, a tool that is designed to please any taste. It is a breeze to operate, and it offers a wide set of resources to check up on, as well as several view modes.

The first thing you'll notice when running the application for the first time is its transparent interface with a lot of system components under scrutiny. In fact, there are few (if any) environment variables this software can't watch over. You will be able to view the live performance of the most important system components and you can add so many fields, they will almost fill the vertical side of your computer display.

Moo0 SystemMonitor is capable of observing the functioning of your system's CPU, hard drive, memory, network, threads, handles and many more. It can show you the usage of each partition or processor core, the incoming and outgoing transfers over the network you're connected to, system uptime, as well as the status of your laptop battery. All these details are presented in a non-tabbed interface, which makes it very easy to read and customize. The configuration can be done via the right-click menus of the application that supply the essentials for setting up this tool.

The fields that are shown in the main window of Moo0 SystemMonitor can be selected either individually or all at once if you need more than those displayed by default. Most modifications can be done to the interface using the "View" menu. Thus it is possible to select from no less than 13 available skins and six layouts (three vertical and three horizontal). To find the best view mode for the video display of your computer you can opt for a larger or smaller text size. Here is an example: our tests clearly revealed that with all the fields active and the Medium size selected, the main window will not fit a 15.4 inch laptop display at 1280 by 800 pixel screen resolution.

Moo0 SystemMonitor provides further visual customizations such as transparency, which ranges from 10 to 90 percent, and auto-hide style, which will enable the application to shrink or become transparent after a specific time interval passes. There is also an option related to the frequency with which the software refreshes the system information. The interval can be set from a minimum of one second to a maximum of 5 minutes.

An interesting feature is the configurable "Mouse Action" that will enable you to assign specific functions that become active when you double click the icon of the app or when you press the middle scroll button. So, you can shrink or restore the main window, resize or iconize it. Besides all these useful configurations, something that needs to be taken into consideration is the fact that Moo0 SystemMonitor uses over 10 MB of RAM to operate. Perhaps this is the small price that has to be paid for the visual styles used by the software. In contrast, the Windows Task Manager needs only a tenth of the system memory required by this tool, but its tabbed interface makes it a bit difficult to see all the system details.

The Good

The strong points of this utility are the diversity of supervised components and the fully customizable interface. You can watch over the most important system resources from the same window and the software can run in the background when you don't need to see it on screen.

The Bad

Even though it displays the current status of key components, Moo0 SystemMonitor fails to show the currently running processes and services, a feature that is specific to Windows Task Manager and that would have completed it. There is also the amount of RAM consumed that could have been reduced at the expense of some visual features. Another minus for this utility is the lack of a help file that would have been very useful for less experienced users.

The Truth

On the whole, Moo0 SystemMonitor proved to be very useful and pretty easy to work with, even if it still needs a few more features to make it a definite must-have for everyone. Most computer users will find it handy and the multitude of visual customizations is bound to please the more exigent of them. If you're after a very good system monitoring tool, all you need to do now is take this software for a test drive to see what it's really capable of.


Here are some snapshots of the application in action: