Installation and Setup

GPU-Z doesn’t have a setup file. Like most of the extreme lightweight freeware programs around, you can simply run it from the EXE. The file itself takes up about half of 1MB and the program runs using about 5MB of ram. GPU-Z is one program you don’t have to worry about taking up any of your systems resources.

Ease of Use

The website for GPU-Z believes that program is so simple to use, you don’t need documentation. Well, it’s simple to use – if you already know what you are talking about. Of course, people who don’t know what the information GPU-Z displays means would probably never need to use the program in the first place, but if you’re a gamer who has an interest in graphics but no technical knowledge, GPU-Z can be a little bit of information overload.

The interface is well designed and does a good job displaying the technical information in a readable form. The sensor screen is of particular use: We tested GPU-Z with an old 8500GT Sapphire card and a mid-range GTX260, and both cards displayed information although the 8500GT’s fan speed did not display. The GTX260 sensors were fully functional, however.

The program can log your sensor information to a file and provide background monitoring for your card. The information it presents is useful for diagnosing any overclocking you might do, although the program lacks features to ‘stress test’ a card or the ability to overclock itself, so you’ll need more than just GPU-Z if you plan on doing any modification.

Still, the program is good for getting basic information and stats on your card, and considering there’s only a 10 second wait from clicking download to running the program, we can hardly fault it.

[ Download GPU-Z Today! ]

Installation and Setup
Installation of NHC is painless and takes only a few seconds. As the program is a configuration tool, there’s quite a few options to run through, some of them quite technical if you’ve never used a similar utility before. The program is designed to run in the background all the time, and takes up around 3MB of system memory while monitoring.

Ease of Use

NHC’s various features can be grouped into those involved with monitoring your hardware and those involved with changing it, usually to achieve a longer lasting battery.

If you bought your laptop packaged from a store you may well have seen different companies use similar software. While they also rely on changing things like CPU speed and brightness to modify system life, they don’t tend to be very configurable. As a rule, they hide many of the advanced options like CPU voltage control from average users, limiting their usefulness.They also tend to be slightly more bloated – for example Samsung’s in house battery life modifier on our test system uses about five times as much ram to do a similar task.

If you’ve never used a hardware control system on your laptop – you owe it to yourself to give this a try. It’s no exaggeration to say that with proper configuration you could extend your system’s battery life by between 5-20%. For a free program, that’s a lot more functionality out your hardware.

Functions on NHC range from the simple to the advanced but the site offers some excellent advice on how to get the program functioning properly. Luckily, the program UI is easy to use, and once you’ve got the basic knowledge of how things work, using the program itself isn’t a problem.

We’ve tested the program on both a laptop and netbook and all of it’s features such as temperature monitoring have worked first time. Other similar programs we’ve tested on these systems – especially the netbook – have had problems finding out system information easily.

Differences Between Free and Professional

The professional version of NHC offers profile systems and full services control, two features generally not required for light users.

Download Notebook Hardware Control Today!

SpeedFan’s main purpose is to monitor your computer’s temperature and control the fans. This means you can lower the fans speed and reduce the noise when your computer runs at idle.

Here is a displaying S.M.A.R.T information for one of my hard drives.

Here is a description from the authors website on how SpeedFan does the job:

SpeedFan monitors temperatures, through available hardware monitor chips which expose their temperature sensors connected to different places inside your computer, and, according to your setup, does its best to keep them at your desired value. You can even change a fan speed according to the temperature of your hard disk. When choosing parameters for the minimum and maximum fan speed, try to set them by hand (disable all the VARIATE FANs checkboxes) and listen to the noise. When you hear no noise from the fan then you can set that value as the minimum fan speed for that fan. I suggest using 100 as the maximum value, unless you hear a lot of noise from it, in which case you might reduce the maximum speed to 95 or 90. Obviously, nothing says that you can’t set 60 as your maximum value and, sometimes, I myself set it that way. Consider that when the WARNING temperature is reached, the program sets the fan speed to 100, whichever maximum speed you set. One last word should be said regarding the USE FAN x listbox. In my pc, more than one temperature changes when a fan runs faster. You can say on which fan every temperature should rely. On my system, TEMP1 and TEMP3 are both influenced by FAN1.

Download SpeedFan

Want to try SpeedFan? Simply use the link below to download SpeedFan!

Download SpeedFan