TROUBLESHOOTING.md

Troubleshooting — Brandulate GPU & CPU Tray Monitor

No icons appear in the system tray

Cause: The monitor may have failed to start, or the icons are hidden in the overflow area.

Fix:

1. Click the ^ arrow in the system tray to check the overflow area
2. If icons are there, pin them: Settings → Personalization → Taskbar → Other system tray icons
3. If no icons at all, check the error log: look for monitor_error.log in the installation folder
4. Try running manually: open Command Prompt as admin and run:

   python "C:\path\to\gpu_cpu_monitor.py"
   

GPU icons show but CPU temperature and power show "--"

Cause: CPU temperature and power require both admin privileges and LibreHardwareMonitor.

Fix:

1. Make sure the monitor is running as administrator
2. Check if LibreHardwareMonitor is installed:
   • Look in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WinGet\Packages\ for a LibreHardwareMonitor folder
   • If not found, run the installer again — it will attempt to install LHM via winget
3. If winget is not available, install LibreHardwareMonitor manually from GitHub

Note: CPU Usage % always works even without admin or LHM. Only temperature and power need the extra setup.

nvidia-smi works but the monitor doesn't detect my GPU

Cause: The Python pynvml package may not be installed correctly.

Fix:

1. Open Command Prompt
2. Run: pip install --upgrade pynvml
3. Restart the monitor

My GPU is in TCC mode — will it work?

Yes. This tool was specifically built to monitor TCC mode GPUs that HWMonitor, GPU-Z, and MSI Afterburner cannot detect. If nvidia-smi can see your GPU, so can this monitor.

TCC mode is commonly used on:

• NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000, RTX A6000, RTX A5000, and other professional GPUs
• Tesla and data center GPUs (V100, A100, H100)

The monitor uses too much memory

The monitor typically uses 60-90MB of RAM. This includes:

• Python runtime (~30MB)
• LibreHardwareMonitor .NET libraries (~20MB)
• Pillow image rendering (~10MB)
• System tray icon management (~10MB)

This is comparable to or lighter than other monitoring tools.

How do I update to a new version?

1. Run uninstall.bat to stop the current version and remove the scheduled task
2. Replace the files with the new version
3. Run install.bat again

The monitor doesn't start on boot

Check the scheduled task:

1. Open Task Scheduler (search "Task Scheduler" in Start menu)
2. Look for "BrandulateGPUCPUMonitor"
3. Verify it's enabled and set to trigger "At log on"
4. If missing, run install.bat again

Check that Python is in PATH:

1. Open Command Prompt
2. Run: pythonw --version
3. If not found, reinstall Python with "Add to PATH" checked

I see duplicate icons after restarting

The monitor has built-in duplicate detection — it kills any previous instance before starting. If you still see duplicates:

1. Right-click one set of icons and choose "Quit"
2. The remaining set is the active one

Error: "No module named 'pystray'"

Run the installer again, or manually install dependencies:

pip install pystray Pillow psutil pynvml pythonnet

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