14 DAY TRIAL // Summer has arrived and temperatures are getting pretty high these days. Summer's heat reaches everyone: us, our pets, cars, and especially our computers. Modern computers are extremely powerful compared to those available 15 years ago, but this comes for a price: they need very good cooling.
Best way to prevent overheating and hardware problems caused by it is to use best cooling solutions available on the market, but even in this case you will need to be aware of the system's temperature all the time. Today's program is developed by ASUS and is called PC Probe. Its ability? To monitor for you system parameters like mainboard and CPU temperatures, voltages and fan rotation speeds.
PC Probe is a freeware program and you have to download just a bit more than 4MB to get started.
When installing the program, you will be required to set threshold values for main board and CPU temperatures as well as for the CPU cooling fan. At the end of the setup process you will have the opportunity to start the application right away and also make it start each time Windows boots up.
Once installed, PC Probe starts to monitor the available sensors. The interface looks outdated, but it's easy to use and gets the job done. Let's explore it and find out everything about this little tool.
The Monitoring area has six sections available.
The first one is called Monitor Summary and shows the items that are currently monitored, their numeric values and status. When you see a "Monitor paused!" status for a certain item that usually means the sensor is not present in your system or not working.
The second section is dedicated to the temperature graphs for CPU and mainboard. You can adjust the threshold values by dragging the blue horizontal bars up or down, as you wish.
The Fan Monitor surveys the rotation speed of your CPU, PSU and chassis fan. In my case, the only active graph is the one dedicated to the CPU fan, because the PSU and chassis don't have any.
Next section, Voltage Monitor, has a single graph that takes care of the tensions available on the 12, 5 and 3.3V power lines and also that of the CPU's core.
Last two sections of the first main area are Settings and History. The first one allows you to set all threshold values, the sensor polling intervals and the volume of the sound alert when one or more values exceed their threshold. The History allows you to record all statistics for as long as you need and then check the behavior of your system over a longer period of time.
The Information area takes care of the basic info available about your hard drive(s), memory and other system devices. Here, you can check how much free space is left on your partitions, the amount of free/occupied physical memory and information about DMI devices such as your mainboard, processor, memory controller and more.
The last area is called Utility and should allow you to launch external applications. Unfortunately, the Execute Program button is grayed out on my computer, so I don't know what to say about this, maybe it will be introduced in the future or maybe it's not working for me and you'll get lucky...
This is PC Probe, all of it. If you own an ASUS mainboard and you don't have it yet, get it. It might be able to work well with other brands, but I didn't get the chance to test that yet. All I can do know is to wish you a nice summer and a cool computer!
The Good
PC Probe is small, easy to operate with and can prove himself as being extremely useful.
The Bad
I wish there was a SMART monitoring module included in this program or at least a hard drive temperature monitoring module. The interface could be brought into this millennium with just a little bit of work.
The Truth
If you want to be warned about the hot spots inside your computer (no, it won't warn you about the bikini babes pictures grabbed from the web by your kids!), then this is the program for you! Above everything, it's free, so don't wait any longer!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
