14 DAY TRIAL // What do you think about spying on your own computer? Well, it can't go out by himself or get some bad habits, but it can get lazy sometimes, or even suffer from memory losses or bad moods... Best way to treat a disease is to prevent it, and the best ways to take care of your computer are to perform regular software and hardware maintenance tasks and, of course, monitor your system's parameters.
Today's system monitoring tool is called Sys Monitor Pro and comes from Handy Software Lab, or just HSLAB, you can call it as you wish. Its latest version is 1.3.13.66, and what I have here is a 15 days trial that can't save your settings for later use until you register it. The strange registration price of this program is 31.62$(I am really curious how they got to this precise amount of money, but that's not my goal here, so let's move on...), and now we're going to see if Sys Monitor Pro is worth its price or not.
The setup package has 3.4MB in size and you shouldn't have any problems installing it. As usual, the problems appear after the download and setup parts are complete, so let's see what we have here...
After a brief look inside the producer's website, especially after checking the screenshots of the other software products they develop, I can say that this program's interface follows HSLAB's standard. It can get better and it can also get worse, and I can't say I am crazy about it. Anyway, the purpose of having a well organized and easy to use interface that won't give you headaches was accomplished, so things are not that bad, after all. These being said, our next task is to explore the eleven items of the main window's menu and discover what's hidden behind them.
To be honest, I expected more from this program. The Common Options area doesn't sound bad at all, since it takes care of the general program's looks(transparency, graph colors), as well as displaying computer information such as computer name, Windows version, user and CPU information, default language and more.
Moving on, we find the Memory, Disk and CPU areas, all having about the same purpose - monitoring your hardware devices and their load. All monitoring is done in real time, and the status can be seen inside the floating bar display that you can place in a corner of your desktop and be able to watch it all the time.
Next area...is the one that just made me crash again the program, and it should display the processes running on your system. I really hope it's going to do this for you, because the only thing I managed to do with it, again and again, was to crash the program.
The areas concerning networking are...well, the remaining ones, more or less. The information present here isn't really interesting, and seeing the computers connected to mine on the LAN or the other computers from the local network located near me aren't exactly the things I expected to find here. At last, the Network Traffic and Network Connections area close this program's arsenal, which I expected to be better, as I said.
Well, you can't have pearls each day, because if you don't see mud you can't really appreciate diamonds, not to talk about the fact that having excellent programs here each day would take away the joy of discovering elite utilities from time to time...
The Good
HSLAB Sys Monitor Pro is easy to use and can be used efficiently for real time monitoring of your system's hardware status.
The Bad
I don't want a better interface or more features at this time, because what this program really misses is reliability. A better documentation would be good, but seeing this program work as it should would be really great!
The Truth
It's a pity to say it, but this program wasn't such a pleasure to try, and I wouldn't recommend even my enemies to buy it! There's a basic thing that every computer program must do in order to be usable, and that is...to work, of course, and this one failed miserably. Next one, please!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
