Monitoring CPU Temperature with Rainmeter

Rainmeter, a popular desktop customization tool, offers various plugins to monitor system metrics and display them visually. One such plugin is the UsageMonitor, which retrieves information from the Windows Performance Monitor to track CPU temperature and other system metrics.

In order to retrieve CPU temperature data using Rainmeter's UsageMonitor plugin, you need to define measures in your skin file. These measures can be customized with various options to suit your needs.

Index

When defining a measure for CPU temperature, you have several options for the Index parameter. You can set it to either 0, -1, or a specific number N. The Index=0 option returns the current total of all instances for a given counter, while Index=-1 returns the current average of all instances. If you specify a numerical value for Index=N, Rainmeter will return the instance at that defined point in a sorted list of all instances.

Name

The Name parameter allows you to define a specific instance or counter name. For example, if you want to monitor the CPU temperature of your 'Rainmeter' process, you can set the Name parameter to 'Rainmeter'. Rainmeter will then return the current value for that specific instance of the counter.

Instance and Counter

The UsageMonitor plugin allows you to define instances and counters in two ways: Instance and Counter. An instance refers to a specific object like 'Rainmeter' or 'C:', while a counter is a category with individual metrics like '% Processor Time' or 'Bytes Read/sec'. These terms are also referred to as Objects in Perfmon.exe.

Category

Counters are organized into related categories like 'Process' or 'PhysicalDisk'. To view all available counters, you can open the Windows Performance Monitor application by running Perfmon.exe.

Retrieving CPU Temperature Data

To retrieve CPU temperature data using Rainmeter's UsageMonitor plugin, you need to define a measure with the following parameters:

* Plugin=UsageMonitor

* Measure=

* Counter=\_Total\ Processor Information

* Instance=CPU

By defining your measure in this way, Rainmeter will retrieve CPU temperature data from the Windows Performance Monitor and display it visually on your desktop.

Rainmeter measure CPU temp