Diagnostic tool for Windows§00

Your PC is probably slower than it should be,and nothing tells you why.

Not because a part is weak — because something is switched off, plugged into the wrong slot, throttling itself, or quietly phoning home. Windows will never mention any of it. Neither will the benchmark you ran, or the tool that just prints temperatures.

Better Taskmgr looks for those things, tells you what it measured, what it expected, how sure it is, and what to do about it.

Download for Windows50 MB Source on GitHub

Early betaTested on exactly one machine so far. It is very likely something reads wrong on yours — that is what issues are for.

HardwareEverything works on any machine, but the vendor-specific depth is currently Intel and NVIDIA only — not by choice, there is simply nothing else here to test on. AMD and Intel graphics will read less, and may read wrong.
AntivirusReading this much about a system looks, to a scanner, a lot like something that should not be. Expect the occasional false positive. The source is public and the release ships checksums, so nothing here has to be taken on trust.

Anatomy of a finding§01

Every finding argues its case.None of them just assert something.

This is one of the nineteen, rebuilt here exactly as the program draws it. Six things are always present, and the last one matters more than it looks.

Simultaneous multithreading is off

cpucertain

Measured: 6 cores / 6 threads
Expected: 6 cores / 12 threads

Half of the hardware thread capacity is unavailable. Heavily threaded work — compiling, rendering, encoding — loses roughly 15 to 30% throughput.

How to fix

Reboot into UEFI setup, usually Del or F2 during POST.
Find Hyper-Threading or SMT Control, typically under Advanced → CPU Configuration.
Set it to Enabled or Auto, save and exit.
If it was turned off deliberately for latency or thermals, archive this instead.

01
severity
A stripe, not a badge. Colour is the only thing you have to read to triage a list of nineteen.
02
measured
What the machine actually answered, from CPUID, firmware tables or the kernel’s own counters.
03
expected
What this same hardware should have answered. The gap between the two rows is the finding.
04
confidence
certain · likely · speculative · suggestion. Stated on every single finding, including the obvious ones.
05
how to fix
Where the setting lives and what it is called there — not a link to a forum thread from 2014.
06
a way to disagree
Archived by finding id, so rewording the message in a later version cannot resurrect something you already dealt with.

What it found§02

Eight things on one desktopits owner considered fine.

39out of 100

11 settings are costing you real performance

19 findings across processor, memory, graphics, storage, network, devices and system policy. Nothing here is guessed without saying so.

All 19
Critical 4
Warning 7
Info 8
Archive 0

Measured
6 cores / 6 threads
Expected
6 cores / 12 threads
Hardware offers 12 — a firmware setting costing 15-30% in anything threaded.
Measured
x8
Expected
x16
Negotiated x8 of the x16 it supports, confirmed twice from independent sources.
The exact pattern that leaves a system in single channel — roughly half the bandwidth.
Measured
87 °C on sensor 2
Expected
59 °C composite, as advertised
The drive advertises the cooler composite figure. The hot sensor is the one that matters.
Measured
9.1% free
Below where NTFS starts placing large files badly.
One of them is the bus the memory modules answer on, which is why their specs cannot be read.
Measured
8.7% retransmitted
Expected
adapter error counters: 0
The adapter’s own error counters sat at a clean zero while this was happening.
Activity history, typing collection, web search, Recall — each with what it sends and how to stop it.

Every one of those is a real finding from a real desktop. Four critical, three warnings, one for information — and the score is a proportion of what could be fixed, not a tally of penalties, so a partly tidied machine reads differently from a stock one.

The part nobody else does§03

When it cannot read something,it names what stopped it.

Most tools have one failure mode: when they cannot read something they print a zero, a dash, or nothing — and you cannot tell this hardware doesn’t have that from I wasn’t allowed to look. That distinction is the entire point here.

ELEVATION WON’T HELP

Module specifications cannot be read

Measuredthe system management bus controller has no driver installed

Declared XMP profiles, timings and the module temperature sensor all live on chips reached over that bus. With no driver on it they are unreachable — and running as administrator does not change that. Install the chipset package from the board vendor, not from Windows Update.

WHY WE CAN’T FULLY TELL

Overclocked or underclocked?FACTORY STOCK

Measuredeverything at factory across 4 checked values, 1 unanswered

Every logical processor reports exactly 3192 MHz. That is either the machine genuinely sitting at nominal, or the power management API repeating the spec sheet — and the two cannot be told apart from here.

A tool that hunts spyware has no business being any. No telemetry, no crash reporting, no update ping, no analytics. The network tab reads counters — it does not open sockets.

Elevation, honestly§04

It starts with no promptand stays useful.

About a third of what a machine can report needs an administrator token. A button in the title bar restarts with one, and disappears once there is one.

Readingwithoutwith

sensor readings0139

CPU temps, voltages, package power—all

per-core clocks3192 MHznominal4290 MHzmeasured

SMART on the SATA drive0 attrs10 attrs

stored network names & gatewaysrefusedreadable

Elevation changes verdicts, not just blank fields. Unelevated, the audit was ready to warn that Turbo Boost might be disabled — 3192 MHz is exactly the base clock. Elevated it measures 4290 and the warning correctly disappears.

Some things elevation doesn’t fix, and it says which: a hypervisor filtering CPUID, a driver refusing its own tuning offsets, a bus with no driver bound to it.

Am I bloated?§05

Five categories,and the last one matters as much as the first.

01sending something somewhereactivity history, typing collection, Recall, telemetry
02no purpose on a configured machineRetail Demo service, Maps manager, Start suggestions
03most people never touch theseOneDrive, Copilot, app launch tracking
04useful to most peopleSearch indexing, SysMain, Print Spooler
05leave these aloneWindows Update, Defender

That last category is there on purpose. Most debloat guides tell you to disable Search indexing, SysMain and Windows Update — and every one of those costs more than it saves. Each entry says what it does, what you lose by removing it, and the best way to do it.

And it shows you everything§06

Diagnosis needs data,so it puts it on screen instead of behind a details button.

The audit tab: 39 out of 100, with every finding arguing its case. — Is My PC OK?every finding carries what was measured, what was expected, and how certain the answer is

CPU tab: per-core history, overclock verdict, caches, socket detail from firmware. — Performance › CPUevery per-core strip is its own history · the overclock verdict states its coverage rather than hedging

Sensors tab: every reading the board will answer for, coloured by quantity. — Sensorscoloured by the quantity measured, so a mixed list scans without reading a single unit

Bloat tab: what each item sends, what you lose, and how to stop it. — Am I bloated?what each item sends, what you lose by removing it, and the best way to do itand yes, there is a setting that renames Microsoft to Microslop everywhere. it is on in this one.

Get it§07

Grab the exe and run it.Nothing else to install.

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. No runtime, no installer, no service left behind. Settings and archived findings live in one folder under your roaming profile, and deleting that folder is a complete uninstall.

Not code signed

A certificate costs money this does not have, so SmartScreen will put up a blue box saying it protected your PC. You have to click More info, then Run anyway. Saying so plainly beats you finding out at the wrong moment — and the source is right there if you would rather build it yourself.

One machine, one build, one set of hardware

It has been tested on a single Intel + NVIDIA desktop. AMD is untested and probably rough. No NVIDIA card is fine — per-engine counters come from the display driver and work on anything, and the tab says when NVML is missing instead of showing zeros. Open an issue when something reads wrong; a screenshot plus what you expected is enough. There is a Discord but it is dead. Issues get read.