Monitoring our PC can be very useful to know if there are potential or real problems to solve, and fortunately, the hardware and software industry has long provided tools to analyze the “health” of our Windows-based equipment.
With these applications and programs, we will be able to evaluate the behavior of any desktop and laptop PC and thus be able to detect those situations that are perhaps slowing down the PC to find out what are the causes. In some cases, in fact, these applications can save us from a major scare and prevent our components from ending up “fried”.
Windows Task Manager
Microsoft has been integrating an application of this type for some time now: it is the Windows task manager, a utility that has been gaining weight little by little and that currently offers a remarkable amount of information about the state of our PC.
Many know it for its usefulness when it comes to which processes are consuming more CPUs or memory: it is easy to detect and terminate them directly from this manager, but the task manager also allows you to obtain a complete summary of the performance of the computer’s major resources.
Thus, it is possible to consult the status of the CPU, memory, disks, network, and even GPU usage at any time to know in detail what is the “effort rate” that our computer is being subjected to at any given moment.
Open Hardware Monitor
The Open Hardware Monitor tool stands out not only for being Open Source but also for being a very complete utility to monitor the temperature of the different components of the PC thanks to the sensors integrated, for example, in the processor.
That’s not all: with this tool, it is possible to know at all times the speed at which the fans are spinning, the voltages the components are operating at, and the frequency at which the processor or the memory is working all times.
This tool is compatible with most of the sensors found today in motherboards, as well as in Intel and AMD CPUs or with graphics cards from the latter and NVIDIA. With it, it is possible for example to analyze the temperatures of the equipment if for example you have performed overclocking operations and you want to check that the temperatures are maintained at appropriate values.
AIDA64
This application has become another reference when it comes to monitoring and diagnosing the state of our PC, and in fact, there are several editions that allow you to adjust to different preferences and user profiles.
On its website, it is possible to download 30-day evaluation versions with limited functions, and in them, you can see how the Extreme version (the most basic despite the name) provides “more than 50 pages of information” about your hardware and its status.
AIDA64 does not stop there, and also offers support for external displays to show component temperatures in real-time, for example. It is also capable of performing stress tests, very useful for overclockers who want to check the stability of the system after these processes, or performance tests to analyze the behavior of these changes in our system.
CPU-Z / HWMonitor
In CPU-Z we have one of the old acquaintances of Windows users, who could quickly and easily identify and monitor different components and aspects of their computers.
The tool is also freeware and is for example to offer complete information about our motherboard, its chipset, the type of memory, its size, and the specifications of the user modules, plus (of course) all the data on the processor used.
Those responsible for this utility are also responsible for HWMonitor, an application that goes further and monitors the status of the components (voltages, temperatures, or fan speed) thanks to the sensors integrated into these elements.
HWiNFO
The name of this freeware application is a bit of an understatement because HWiNFO not only provides information about your system but also allows you to analyze and monitor these components.
Its developers boast that this utility is used even by NASA, and its informative options go for example further and allow you to create reports of all kinds that can serve as a log of all kinds of changes to systems and how those changes can affect their performance.
The tool even allows something interesting: select hardware components such as the audio chip and check for driver updates, although in many cases only a generic link to a search engine on the manufacturer’s support website is provided. That’s something.
Speccy
It might seem that we are talking about an emulator of the mythical ZX Spectrum, but in reality, Speccy is a freemium utility that allows us to display information about our system and monitor, like its peers, the status of various components.
This application tries to provide a clear format to show this summary of the information of the components of our system, and also this information about the temperatures of the components of our system.
A curious utility of this application is the ability to save the results of our analysis as a screenshot, an XML file, or a text file to be able to share them easily for example in social networks or discussion forums where we are looking for answers to a certain problem.
Speedfan
There are somewhat more specific tools that are also striking, and among them is SpeedFan, a small utility dedicated exclusively to the fans that we have installed on our computer.
This tool is certainly remarkable for all users, but above all, it is remarkable for those who want to finely control the behavior of the fans so that neither the temperature of the components nor the noise generated by the fans compromises our work sessions.
With SpeedFan, it is possible to find out at what speed the fans we have installed are running, but it is also possible to control and change those speeds to manage each fan in a specific way.
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