Performance Monitor Lite - .NET runtime prerequisites
=====================================================

There are none. Both builds carry their own .NET runtime.

  * PerformanceMonitorLite-win-Setup.exe

    Self-contained. Nothing to install first, and it auto-updates.

  * PerformanceMonitorLite-<version>.zip

    Self-contained as well, as of the release after 3.5.0. Unzip it
    anywhere and run PerformanceMonitorLite.exe. A stock Windows Server
    with no .NET on it at all is fine.

This file used to be a list of runtimes to go and install. It is kept
because both READMEs promise it is here, and because "nothing" is the
answer people came looking for.


IF LITE WILL NOT START
----------------------

If what you got was the .NET host's own message, with no product branding
on it:

    You must install .NET to run this application.
    Framework: 'Microsoft.WindowsDesktop.App', version '10.0.0'

...then you are running a ZIP from 3.5.0 or earlier. That build had no
runtime of its own and needed two installed, and it could not tell you so
itself: the host resolves frameworks before a single line of Lite's code
runs, which is why the error carries no instructions. Download the current
release and the problem does not exist.

Anything else - a message with our name on it, or a window that opens and
then misbehaves - is not this. The log under
%LOCALAPPDATA%\PerformanceMonitorLite-Data\logs is the place to look.


WHY THE ZIP GOT SMALLER, NOT BIGGER
-----------------------------------

Bundling a runtime normally grows a download. This one roughly halved,
because the old build targeted no particular platform and so carried the
native libraries for ALL of them: 537 MB of runtimes\ on a 565 MB tree
covering macOS, Linux, ARM64, musl, loongarch and riscv64, of which only
the 52 MB win-x64 folder could ever load on Windows. Pinning the build to
win-x64 drops all of that, which is worth far more than the bundled .NET,
WPF and ASP.NET Core add back.

    portable, no bundled runtime   565 MB tree   212.7 MB zipped
    self-contained win-x64         277 MB tree   114.2 MB zipped


Full detail: Lite/README.md in the source repository,
https://github.com/erikdarlingdata/PerformanceMonitor
