Windows 11 gets some useful widgets for CPU, memory, and GPU monitoring
By Tom Warren, a senior editor covering Microsoft, PC gaming, console, and tech. He founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge in 2012.
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The Windows Widgets feature is finally getting some useful additions to let you monitor CPU, memory, and GPU usage. Neowin has spotted that Microsoft’s new release of a Dev Home app includes several new widgets for Windows 11.
You can use the new widgets to monitor processor utilization and speed, memory usage, GPU temperatures and usage, and Wi-Fi or Ethernet speeds. They’re certainly a lot more useful than the usual widgets or the news feeds full of junk stories from MSN. Microsoft did announce at Build earlier this month that you’ll be able to disable the Microsoft News feed in the widgets board later this year, thankfully.
You can get similar information from the Game Bar, the Windows Task Manager, or apps like HWiNFO64, but it’s neat to be able to bring up the widgets with the Windows key + W shortcut.
The widgets do seem to be a little buggy right now, which is probably why the Dev Home app that enables them is still in preview. I noticed my widgets panel freeze up after first installing them, and both the CPU and GPU utilization didn’t track properly until I rebooted. They’ve been running fine ever since, though.
If you’re interested in trying out these new widgets on Windows 11 then you’ll need to head to the Microsoft Store and install the Dev Home Preview app. The widgets will then be available in the Windows Widgets section (Winkey + W) and you can add them using the + button at the top.
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