Winstats Review: I Put CPU, RAM & GPU Stats on My Windows 11 Taskbar

I check my laptop’s CPU and memory more often than I’d like to admit. When something makes the fans spin up or Chrome starts dragging, my first instinct used to be Ctrl + Shift + Esc. Later I switched to a Windhawk mod that shows CPU and RAM figures in the notification area, and that did the job for a long time.

Then I came across Winstats. On paper it’s the same idea, but it covers a lot more ground: graphics card load, disk reads and writes, and upload and download speeds, all on the taskbar. It’s also small enough that I didn’t think twice before trying it. I’ve been running it on my everyday laptop, and it tells me far more than the Windhawk setup ever did.

Here’s what it does well, where it falls short, and how to set it up, including the Windows SmartScreen warning you may see on first launch.

What is Winstats?

Winstats is a lightweight performance monitor for Windows written by developer Oleksandr Zhabotynskyi. If you’ve ever seen Stats on macOS, the menu-bar monitor many Mac users swear by, you’ll recognise the look immediately. The developer openly credits it as the design inspiration, though no code was borrowed.

The clever bit is how it fits in. Instead of floating a window over your taskbar, Winstats attaches itself inside the taskbar and draws with transparency, so it blends in with whatever taskbar colour or translucency you’re using. On my Windows 11 machine it looks like it belongs there.

A few quick facts, checked against the project’s GitHub page:

• Current version: 0.2.1
• File size: 1.5 MB for the 64-bit winstats.exe, 1.36 MB for the 32-bit build
• Licence: MIT (free for anyone, source code public)
• Built with: Rust, with no extra runtimes to install
• Languages: 29 interface languages, picked automatically from your Windows language

What you see on the taskbar

Out of the box, Winstats puts a compact strip to the left of your system tray. Each module can be shown in a few different styles, and you choose which ones you want:

• CPU: one small bar per core, a history graph, or a plain percentage. My Ryzen shows 12 bars, one for each thread.
• RAM: a percentage, a history graph, or used and free memory stacked on top of each other.
• GPU: a load percentage or a graph.
• Network: live download and upload speeds, as numbers or a chart.
• Disk: live read and write speeds, as numbers or a chart.
• Battery: charge and state, and it hides itself on desktops without one.

The small vertical labels (“CPU”, “NET”, “DSK”) help you tell things apart at a glance. Once you’re used to the layout, you can switch them off for a cleaner look.

Left-click any readout for the full picture

This is where Winstats beats the simpler taskbar meters I’ve used. A left click on any widget opens a clean popup with much more detail. A double-click takes you straight into Task Manager when you need to end something.

CPU popup

You get a history graph, the split between system and user load, idle time, the current clock speed (2.6 GHz when I grabbed this) and a bar for every core. Underneath is a list of the processes using the most CPU. Look at the bottom of that list: when I captured this screenshot, winstats.exe itself was using 0.3% CPU. That’s a very small footprint on this test machine, though actual usage will vary with the update interval and what else the system is doing.

If you own a recent Intel chip with performance and efficiency cores, Winstats separates the two groups with a divider. You can also group all the P-cores first if you prefer.

Memory popup

This one impressed me the most. Beyond usage, free memory and committed memory, it reads your RAM type, speed and channel count straight from the firmware. Mine correctly reported DDR4 at 3200 MT/s, 8 GB + 16 GB, two channels, details you’d normally need CPU-Z for.

The pie chart shows where your memory is actually going: app memory, kernel and drivers, driver-locked memory and what’s still available. The top-processes list confirmed what I already suspected: Chrome was holding 2.5 GB, far more than anything else on the system.

Disk, network and GPU popups

The disk popup lists each physical drive by model and connection type. On my laptop that’s the SK Hynix NVMe and the WD SATA drive. It shows read and write speeds for each drive, the apps doing the most disk activity, and a free-space bar for every partition. If one drive is just noise, click it and Winstats stops counting it in the taskbar reading.

The network popup works the same way. It shows your current IP address, a traffic graph, totals since launch, and every physical adapter (Wi-Fi, Ethernet, even a phone’s USB tethering connection) with its own speed. The GPU popup covers load, video memory in use, driver version and every graphics adapter in the system. On my hybrid laptop it listed both the AMD Radeon integrated graphics and the GTX 1650.

Customise almost everything from one right-click

Right-click the strip and you get a surprisingly deep settings menu. The thing I appreciate most is that every change applies instantly. There’s no Save button and no restart. Since version 0.2.1, the menu also stays open while you tick options, so you can adjust several things in one go.

Here’s what you can change:

• Which widgets appear, per module (CPU, GPU, RAM, Disk, Network, Battery)
• Their order. Just drag a widget along the strip with your mouse.
• Position: next to the tray, or on the far left of the taskbar
• Colours: your Windows accent colour, a fixed colour from a palette, monochrome, or “by utilisation”, which shifts from green to yellow, orange and red as load rises. Each module can have its own colour.
• Font size, chart width and CPU bar width
• Update interval (the default is once per second)
• Top processes: show 5, 10, 15 or 20 apps in each popup
• Theme: automatic, light or dark
• Language and Start with Windows

The “by utilisation” mode is the one worth trying first. It sounds gimmicky, but the idea is sound: the numbers stay green while things are calm, and a jump to orange or red catches your eye without you having to read anything.

Power users can also edit everything by hand in %APPDATA%\winstats\config.toml (there’s an “Open config file” shortcut in the menu). That file also holds a couple of options the menu doesn’t expose, such as the floating mode I mention below.

The hidden extra: watch other PCs from your taskbar

This is the feature I didn’t expect in an app this small. Winstats can pull stats from other computers on your home network and show them in your taskbar next to your own readings, each with its own colour and a short label.

To do it, you run a companion program called winstats-agent on each machine you want to watch. Builds are available for Linux (x86-64 and ARM64), Intel Macs and Windows. A Windows PC that already runs Winstats can simply share itself instead. Then, on your main PC, right-click the strip, open Remote machines, turn on discovery, and connect to whatever shows up.

Clicking a remote widget opens the same detailed popups as your local ones, with that machine’s processes. The agent can even report CPU temperature and load average when the system provides them.

How to download and run Winstats (step by step)

Step 1: Grab the right file from GitHub

Head to the Winstats releases page on GitHub. You’ll see 11 files, which looks confusing, but you only need one of these:

• winstats.exe for 64-bit (x64) Windows. Most modern Intel and AMD Windows PCs should use this one.
• winstats-x86.exe for older 32-bit Windows
• Or the matching .zip files (win64 / win32) if you’d like the README and licence included

Don’t download the winstats-agent files unless you want to monitor another computer from your main PC. They get installed on those other machines, not on the one you’re sitting at. Note that there’s no ARM64 build of Winstats yet.

Step 2: Extract and run it

If you downloaded the zip, extract it first. I put mine in a folder on my data drive so it wouldn’t sit in Downloads forever. Then double-click winstats.exe.

Step 3: Get past the SmartScreen warning

Windows will almost certainly show a blue “Windows protected your PC” box with Unknown publisher. The Winstats executable isn’t code-signed, and Windows identifies the publisher as “Unknown” in the SmartScreen prompt. Click More info, then Run anyway.

Step 4: Make it start with Windows

The widgets appear straight away. Winstats doesn’t launch at boot by default, though, so right-click the strip and tick Start with Windows. It adds a normal entry under your user’s startup programs, nothing system-wide.

Which Windows versions are supported?

Windows 7 support is an unusual inclusion for a small modern utility. The developer builds with Rust 1.77, the last toolchain that still runs on Windows 7. If you’ve got an old family PC or a workshop machine still on Windows 7, this is one of the few modern monitors that will run on it.

The limitations you should know about

No app is perfect, and Winstats is still young (version 0.2.x). These are the things that might put you off:

• No temperatures or fan speeds. Reading those on Windows needs a kernel-level driver, and the developer has chosen not to ship one. For that, you’ll still want a tool like HWiNFO or FanControl.
• Primary monitor only. On a multi-monitor setup the strip shows up on your main taskbar only.
• No vertical taskbars. If yours is docked on the side, Winstats won’t work there.
• Windows 11 overlap. Windows 11 doesn’t let apps shrink its centred app list, so with lots of windows open, your app icons can run over the widgets. The fix is to move Winstats to the left side of the taskbar, or set mode = "floating" in the config file.
• Unsigned file. Expect the SmartScreen prompt, and possibly a raised eyebrow from stricter antivirus tools.

On privacy: the remote-machine discovery feature is off by default, so Winstats doesn’t listen for other machines unless you enable it. Separately, the app checks GitHub for a newer version about 20 seconds after it starts, and you can also run that check manually from the menu.

Winstats vs other taskbar monitors

I’ve tried a few of these on Techno360 now, so here’s how Winstats compares:

These tools overlap, but they serve somewhat different use cases. Winstats is for hardware monitoring on the taskbar. WidBar is a broader widget bar. The Windhawk mod is lightweight taskbar customisation with basic CPU and RAM figures. TaskSlinger is for actually managing processes. Winstats can show you what’s hogging resources, but when you need to end a process, you still open a task manager.

Looking for more tools like this? My roundup of the 35 best free PC programs for 2026 has plenty of other bloat-free picks for tuning and monitoring your Windows PC.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Winstats safe to use?

Winstats is free and open source under the MIT licence, and its source code is public on GitHub. However, the Windows executable isn’t code-signed, and on first launch the SmartScreen prompt lists the publisher as “Unknown”. Download it only from the official GitHub release page, and for an extra check, compare its SHA-256 hash with the value published there.

Does Winstats show CPU or GPU temperature?

No. Temperatures and fan speeds need a kernel driver on Windows, and Winstats deliberately doesn’t install one. It shows load, clock speed, memory, video memory, disk and network activity instead.

Does Winstats work on Windows 10 and Windows 7?

Yes. It runs on Windows 7 SP1, 8, 8.1, 10 and 11, in both 64-bit and 32-bit versions. Windows 8/8.1 lose the GPU load reading, and on Windows 7 the strip floats above the taskbar instead of sitting inside it.

Do I need to install Winstats?

No. It’s a single portable file of about 1.5 MB. Run it and the widgets appear. Your settings are saved in %APPDATA%\winstats\config.toml.

Does it work on a second monitor or a vertical taskbar?

Not at the moment. The widgets appear only on the primary monitor’s taskbar, and vertical taskbars aren’t supported.

How do I remove Winstats?

Right-click the strip, untick Start with Windows, then click Exit. Delete winstats.exe, and if you want your settings gone too, delete the %APPDATA%\winstats folder. There’s no uninstaller because nothing was installed.