CPU-Z
CPU-Z is a freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of your system.
CPU
- Name and number.
- Core stepping and process.
- Package.
- Core voltage.
- Internal and external clocks, clock multiplier.
- Supported instructions sets.
- Cache information.
Mainboard
- Vendor, model and revision.
- BIOS model and date.
- Chipset (northbridge and southbridge) and sensor.
- Graphic interface.
Memory
- Frequency and timings.
- Module(s) specification using SPD (Serial Presence Detect) : vendor, serial number, timings table.
System
- Windows and DirectX version.
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SpeedFan
SpeedFan allows you to have a deeper view of the status of your computer. Almost every computer includes support for hardware monitoring. Accessing digital temperature sensors is really useful. If you are trying to figure out why your pc hangs when under heavy load or after some hours of usage, SpeedFan might help you to find the real cause.
Very often it is a poor power supply, or an improperly installed heatsink that lead to behaviours that we tend to associate with errors from the operating system, but that are not. SpeedFan automatically searches your computer for interesting chips: the hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can expose voltages, fan speeds and temperatures.
On rare occasions, the BIOS doesn’t activate such features. SpeedFan tries to enable them as long as this is a safe thing to do. Not only the motherboard is searched, but also some video cards and almost every recent hard disk.
SpeedFan can access status info from EIDE, SATA and even SCSI drives, showing, in a consistent way, internal data that can be used to diagnose current and future hard disk failures. This is known as S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology). At the lowest level, SpeedFan is a hardware monitor software that can access digital temperature sensors, but its main feature is that it can control fan speeds according to the temperatures inside your pc, thus reducing noise.
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Core Temp
Core Temp is a compact, no fuss, small footprint program to monitor CPU temperature.
The uniqueness of it is that it shows the temperature of each individual core in a each processor in your system! You can see in real time how the CPU temperature varies when you load your CPU. It’s also completely motherboard independant.
Intel and AMD recently published detailed, public information about the “DTS” (Digital Thermal Sensor), which provides much higher accuracy and more relevant temperature reading than the standard thermal diode sensors do. This feature is supported on all Intel Core and Core 2 based processors as well as the whole AMD’s Athlon64 line of CPUs.
Core Temp also has a logging feature, allowing a user to easily record the temperature of his processor(s) over any period of time, then the data can be easily transfered into an excel datasheet for easy graphing.
Core Temp works on Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista (both 32bit and 64bit versions).
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HD Tune
HD Tune is a Hard Disk utility which has the following features:
- Benchmark: measures the raw performance
- Transfer Rate
- Access Time
- CPU Usage
- Burst Rate
- Hard Disk information which includes firmware version, serial number, disk capacity, buffer size, transfer mode
- Hard Disk Health
- S.M.A.R.T. Information (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology)
- Temperature
- Power On Time
- Copy text to clipboard
- Copy screenshot to clipboard
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PageDefrag
One of the limitations of the Windows NT/2000 defragmentation interface is that it is not possible to defragment files that are open for exclusive access. Thus, standard defragmentation programs can neither show you how fragmented your paging files or Registry hives are, nor defragment them. Paging and Registry file fragmentation can be one of the leading causes of performance degradation related to file fragmentation in a system.
PageDefrag uses advanced techniques to provide you what commercial defragmenters cannot: the ability for you to see how fragmented your paging files and Registry hives are, and to defragment them. In addition, it defragments event log files and Windows 2000/XP hibernation files (where system memory is saved when you hibernate a laptop).
PageDefrag works on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Server 2003.
JpegBook
JpegBook is a great little utility to convert a text file into a Jpeg, allowing you to view books, manuals or any other text document on your PSP.
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Foxit Reader
Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 2.1 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and rich feature set. Foxit Reader supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7.
- Incredibly small: The download size of Foxit Reader is only 2.1 M which is a fraction of Acrobat Reader 20 M size.
- Breezing-fast: When you run Foxit Reader, it launches instantly without any delay. You are not forced to view an annoying splash window displaying company logo, author names, etc.
- Annotation tool: Have you ever wished to annotate (or comment on) a PDF document when you are reading it? Foxit Reader allows you to draw graphics, highlight text, type text and make notes on a PDF document and then print out or save the annotated document.
- Text converter: You may convert the whole PDF document into a simple text file.
- High security and privacy: Foxit Reader highly respects the security and privacy of users and will never connect to the Internet without users’ permission. While other PDF readers often silently connect to the Internet in the background. Foxit PDF Reader does not contain any spyware.
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