yftx888/Pulse

Pulse is a single Pulse.exe for 64-bit Windows 10/11 that displays hardware, battery and network status as a floating desktop widget, making it a system utility rather than a monitoring server. It suits people who want a persistent at-a-glance view without opening Task Manager.

What it shows and how it works

Full mode stacks up to twelve optional panels: a four-cell hardware block (CPU, GPU 3D-engine usage, memory, and CPU/memory package power from Energy Meter counters), battery and charging detail, a power trend chart, network speed, top three processes excluding Pulse, disk I/O, system-disk usage, system info, graphics memory/temperature, Wi-Fi, battery health and frame rate. Power readings are not invented: when counters are missing or a read fails, the cell shows -- with a short reason rather than 0 W README.

A mini single-line mode condenses selected values, and a taskbar mode embeds two rows next to the clock, moving beside the Start button when the taskbar is crowded. Both compact modes use software rendering; full mode uses hardware rendering.

Latency is measured with WinHTTP HTTP requests through the system proxy, not ICMP ping, with three fixed probe addresses. Only HTTP 2xx counts as success; redirects such as a captive login page count as a failed probe. Three consecutive failures declare an outage, and a confirmed physical NIC disconnect declares one immediately after debounce. Probing stops entirely when outage alerts are off and no surfaced mode displays latency README.

Requirements and limits

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit; no installation is required, and the install script copies to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Pulse releases.
• Normal use needs no admin rights. Only the FPS feature requires administrator, because it opens an ETW session. CPU temperature is not offered at all (it would need a kernel driver).
• GPU power uses NVML only for an NVIDIA discrete GPU reported in D0, and only in full mode; AMD discrete-GPU power is unsupported. GPU utilization may come from another adapter.
• Vertical or side taskbars are not supported; there the app falls back to a temporary mini window and retries about every 30 seconds. Windows 10 taskbar embedding is reported as untested.
• Some programs may not expose frame counts.
• The EXE is unsigned, so SmartScreen may warn on first run.

Settings and logs stay local under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Pulse; the only network traffic is the latency probes, and there is no telemetry or auto-update. Autostart is an optional HKCU Run entry. The uninstall script can keep or remove configuration and logs README.

Performance reference

On one Intel Core Ultra 5 226V laptop, the author reports roughly 0.1–0.15% of one core for taskbar mode and 0.5–1.5% for full mode, with about 13 MB and 40 MB private working set respectively. Loading the full panel once keeps the graphics driver resident, so memory does not return to its initial value until restart; the author states these figures vary by machine and settings README.