Use SpeedFan To Monitor Computer Temperature
Linux users never have to worry about not knowing how hot or how cold a computer runs since aptitude and apt-get and yum and yast and whatever else are only a command line away to obtain the temperature sensor programs/widgets. For Windows users, you (as in all Windows users) have to search the Internet for such a program to download, and hopefully it won’t be a download that has a virus. No worry, I’m here to tell you such a program exists, and it is safe to download and safe to use for Windows. I found out this program known as SpeedFan from CNET as I browsed Google for such a program. I’m glad that CNET has a review on this very program, and I trust CNET since whenever CNET recommends a software to use, the software seems to be solid and safe to use.
The whole purpose for some of us to download SpeedFan is to keep check on how hot or how cold our computers have ran. So we don’t really need to understand the advance options that SpeedFan has, because those options are something that even an average computer user may not understand. Another advantage of running SpeedFan due to the fact that this software utilizes the sensor mechanism of your hardware and certain capabilities of your hardware to control how fast or how slow a computer’s fan runs according to how hot or how cold a computer is; this helps bring down the consumption of electricity (energy) and noise.
After installing SpeedFan, you have to open the program and let it runs, otherwise it won’t be activated and lies dormant as if you haven’t yet installed it. SpeedFan launches slowly as it probes for hardware’s capabilities, but it won’t affect your computer performance. There are many advance options that you could toy with through SpeedFan’s easy to understand and navigate user interface, but I recommend you not to mess with such complicated options and features unless you know what you’re doing, otherwise you could really create some strange computer behaviors that you may regret for having done so. After all, we’re installing SpeedFan to keep an eye on the computer’s temperature.
Why should we know how hot or how cold our computer runs? When a computer runs too hot, and not enough airflow permeates throughout the computer case, and the fan is not running correctly, all of this could lead to a very slow computer; in extreme case, all of this could lead to broken components. Luckily, this generation laptops and computers do have mechanism that shut down your machine when it gets too hot to prevent a worse scenario. Still, even with such a mechanism, there is no guaranteed that everything is normal with the machine. By knowing the temperature for a computer/laptop beforehand, we could brainstorm and poke around for a solution before any type of mechanism or mishap kicks in. In this way you could prolong the machine’s lifespan.
How could you tell at what temperature that your computer/laptop should be running? It’s depending on the type of processors and components that your computer have. For processors, you have to look up that with the manufacturers for information, and these information could be easily found on theirs websites. Each processor has its own maximum temperature which dictates when a computer runs beyond the maximum temperature prescribed by a process’s manufacturer, your computer/laptop could stop functioning correctly and may horribly go wrong. A same recommendation from many sources seems to agree that a computer/laptop’s temperature should be running at a room temperature. What’s a room temperature? Wikipedia has the answer to this!
To use SpeedFan, you can download the latest version at here. To reinforce your trust on SpeedFan, you could check out the CNET’s SpeedFan Review. I’m running SpeedFan on Windows 7, and it seems to work just fine! I haven’t yet tested SpeedFan with any other version of Windows besides Windows 7, and so if you have tested SpeedFan with other Windows versions, please write a comment or two to let me and everyone knows how it goes. Check out a SpeedFan screenshot that I took for your viewing pleasure right after the jump!
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