Windows Tip - Monitor Your Hardware Temperature With HWMonitor

With many innovations being made to today's PC's hardware, laptops and desktops have become much smaller and lighter. But one drawback to that light weight convenience is heat.

Computers today can pack more processing power in a much smaller and denser space, if you don't keep them cool, you can pretty much guarantee a hardware failure will occur.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to keep tabs on hardware temperature using a free utility called CPUID.

HWMonitor from CPUID software is a hardware monitoring program that reads your PC Systems main health sensors, such as voltages, temperatures and fans speed. I mostly use it on my home PC to keeps tabs just on temperature since I use a laptop.

HWMonitor requires no installation and is a true portable application (does not copy files or create folders on your hard drive, or writes to the registry).

To run it, just launch HWMonitor.exe.

HWMonitor will display the current temperature along with the minimum and maximum values. If your system is capable of displaying voltages and fan speeds, you will also see those valuse displayed (my system does not).

The program can also handle the most common sensor chips, such as ITE IT87 series, most Winbond® ICs, and others. In addition, it can read modern CPUs on-die core thermal sensors, as well has hard drives temperature via S.M.A.R.T, and video card GPU temperature.

HWMonitor can be run right off your USB stick and is handy to have when troubleshooting. The only feature missing, is the capability to minimize to the system tray.

CPUID also makes other utilities including PCWizard that can analyze and benchmark your PC, and includes a powerful inventory feature that is useful if you need to re-install Windows (check out Need To Reinstall Windows? Take Hardware And Software Inventory Before Starting for more information).

HWMonitor can be downloaded at CPUID website.