Parts Life
A desktop companion where PC part characters show your machine's load through how they look. No numbers up front. The busier they are, the faster they move; at full tilt their outlines glow red and steam rises from their heads. And the work they do each day quietly becomes an adventure of its own.
It is Task Manager — minus the numbers, plus parts that are alive.
Windows 10 (1809+) / 11, 64-bit. No installer, no .NET required. Free and open source.
The harder they work, the hotter they get
Speed alone cannot tell 'quick' from 'desperate'. As load rises their outlines start to glow, and higher still, steam rises from their heads. Parked in a corner of your screen, it tells you at a glance whether your machine is coasting or gasping.
Want the numbers? Press the arrow
While collapsed it shows no numbers at all. Press the arrow and you get per-logical-core load, memory, per-GPU utilisation and VRAM, disk throughput, and every drive's capacity with its SSD/HDD type. Every graphics card you own gets its own row.
A story that runs itself
Along the top, their journey advances on its own — powered by how much your machine actually works. Leave it idle and it crawls; put it under load and it moves. Experience works the same way: each character only earns from its own work. With two graphics cards, only the one that is busy grows.
You cannot interfere. There are no choices, no stats to raise, nothing to click. Because you cannot interfere, you can simply leave it running — and glance over now and then to find the scene has moved on.
“The cooler stayed close. It guards exactly one part — but today it is trying to cool the whole valley.”
What it deliberately does not do
- It does not list processes. It is not a replacement for Task Manager.
- It never asks for administrator rights.
- Because of that, it does not show CPU temperature or fan speed: reading those on Windows requires a kernel driver, which brings antivirus false positives and trust problems for a distributed binary. Not a cost a playful desktop toy should pay. Load stands in for heat instead.
- It does not talk to the network. It only saves settings and story progress under %APPDATA%\PartsLife\.
Windows SmartScreen will warn you the first time. Click “More info” then “Run anyway”. If you would rather not, read the source and build it yourself — everything is public.
This warning is not really about signing. Microsoft changed the rules in 2024: even an EV certificate no longer clears it immediately. Reputation now accrues per file, whatever the certificate.
Code signing
The executable we distribute is built from source by GitHub Actions, and every release ships with its SHA-256 so you can verify what you downloaded.
Free code signing is provided by SignPath.io, with a certificate by the SignPath Foundation.
Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.
Open source
Take it apart and rebuild it however you like. The story text lives in a JSON file, so you can add scenes without recompiling anything.
- Source code: MIT licence
- Character artwork: CC BY 4.0 (attribution required)
The specifications, compatibility marks and story these characters show are all for fun. They are not a reference for purchases or settings — always check the actual product specs.