A quiet overlay for people who want their computer to show them what it's doing without showing off about it.

Why hairline wireframe.

The dominant performance overlays render as filled rectangles, bright halo'd gauges, or HUD-style strips along the top of the screen. They work, and they're loud. Crystal Clear takes the opposite stance: the visualisation is a thin outline, the numerals are outline-only, and the background is transparent everywhere except the hairline itself. The result is an overlay you can see through. Your work, your game, your code editor, your photograph — whatever is on the desktop underneath remains readable. The orb doesn't compete for attention; it's there when you look at it.

The design comes from a specific frustration: most monitoring tools assume you want to watch your machine. Crystal Clear assumes you want to do work on your machine, and you want the metrics available without having to give them eye contact. Hairline outlines, no fills, and a click-through interaction model serve that goal directly.

How the orbs sit on your desktop.

Each orb is a frameless WPF window with click-through enabled by default. That means the orb is visible but does not intercept your mouse — clicks pass through to whatever is underneath. You can position an orb directly over a button you actively use, and the button still works. To move an orb, you flip the drag-mode toggle in the system tray; click-through turns off for every orb, you drag them where you want them, and you flip the toggle back. The orbs remember their position across launches.

Click-through is the unlock that makes the overlay actually usable as a permanent fixture. Most overlays force you to choose between "visible but in the way" and "invisible until I summon it." Crystal Clear chooses neither.

What each orb shows.

How the data flows.

An elevated bridge process — registered as a Windows scheduled task at install time — reads CPU and GPU sensors through LibreHardwareMonitor and writes a snapshot file roughly once a second. The orbs themselves run unelevated; they read the snapshot file at their own pace and never talk to the kernel-mode sensor driver directly. The decoupling is intentional: only one process needs admin, and the per-orb processes can crash or restart without affecting the sensor pipeline.

The sparkline buffer is fixed-size and circular. The workload arc updates at one hertz with a short ease-out so the value never snaps. The bridge self-exits about thirty seconds after the last orb heartbeat goes stale, so closing the orbs also closes the bridge — no zombie processes between sessions.

What the Hub is.

The Hub is the small control panel where you change everything else. It's a single window with six tabs: a dashboard that mirrors what your live orbs are showing, an orbs tab for toggling which orbs auto-start, an appearance tab for editing each orb's four-colour theme, an alerts tab for setting thresholds (CPU over 85 °C, disk over 95 %, that kind of thing), a behaviour tab for global toggles like Crystal Clear Mode and the ISP-cap setting, and an about tab. The Hub lives inside the tray process and you can ignore it entirely if you like the defaults.