Keeping your PC Healthy
Unlike buying a PC, keeping your PC healthy is a continuous task you have to do. Don't worry though, its not that hard (most of the time)! Doing a little spring cleaning, both for your software and hardware can do wonders to your PC, even claiming back the performance you use to have.Hardware
Hardware Monitoring
While this may seem so obvious, monitoring is one of the best way you could detect a problem on your PC. By monitoring your hardware, you can detect early symptoms of hardware failures, irregularities or below than average performance from your PC. You need to monitor these essential peripherals: processor, graphics card, hard drive and power supply. The reason is simple, because they feature moving parts - your processor, graphics card and power supply are cooled by fans while your hard drive uses a motor to spin the data platter. Non moving parts and peripherals such as memory, motherboard. network / LAN adapter, sound card usually can't be monitored. Make no mistake though, they can and eventually will 'wear out', but they often last for years without any problems.If you bought your PC in parts or have someone build it for you, chances are you have the included CD bundle. Besides drivers, manufacturers and vendors often bundle monitoring software for their product. Check the CD contents to be sure. If you're out of luck, you can use free, third party utilities. Software like Motherboard Monitor and SpeedFan can be used to monitor your PC hardware's health and alert you to any impending failure or problem. Unfortunately, Motherboard Monitor is not updated anymore. You can download SpeedFan directly from the developer's website at http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
Processor and fans
You can quickly see these monitoring softwares display all kinds of information regarding your hardware. The most important ones are your processors' temperature and the ambient air temperature inside your PC's case. Now you can see in real time what they are without going into the BIOS menu. What's more important is that monitoring software can be setup to trigger an action such as displaying a warning or even forcing a shutdown if one of the monitored statistics went over a limit. This safeguard will keep your PC from permanent damage if your processor gets too hot.They also display information regarding your fans' rotation speed. You could monitor several fans such as the processors fan, the system fan or additional fan connected to the motherboard. Now remember, some fans can't be monitored. To be monitored, these fans must be connected to the motherboard and supports monitoring. Fans that has built-in monitoring usually comes with three wires, so if your fan only comes with two wires you're out of luck.
Power supply
Then there's the voltage rails. Monitoring software often also displays information regarding the voltage of each of your power supply voltage rails. This is an important feature since by monitoring your rails in Windows, you could see whether or not the rails fluctuate or goes too low or too high when under load. You can't do this in the BIOS screen, since your PC is idle. Remember, if your rails went more than 10 % of its supposed values (such as 3,2 or 3,4 volts for the 3.3 volt rail), this is a sign that your power supply is barely keeping up with the electrical demands of your PC. Bear in mind, that this is only a sign - some motherboards reports less than 11.9 or 12.1 volt on the 12 rails even when the real voltage is still 12 volts.Most hard drives available today comes with S.M.A.R.T. What this feature do is it will let you know how healthy your hard drive is. If your hard drive starts to fail, S.M.A.R.T will send an alert to your S.M.A.R.T aware software, so you have some time to backup your data before your hard drive fails completely. All motherboard can be configured to activate S.M.A.R.T so your monitoring software that's S.M.A.R.T aware can alert you when this happens. You could also monitor the hard drive's temperature, since a too hot hard drive tends to fail more quickly than a cool one. If your hard drive is too hot (above 40 or 50 degrees Celsius), you might consider cooling it with a low speed fan or using a hard drive enclosure that's equipped with one.
You can also configure these softwares to log the values per second while they run. This is handy if you want to troubleshoot your PC and see how it perform at idle and full load (such as playing a heavy game or application).
In most cases your motherboard will be correctly identified and these software will automatically configure themselves. For the ones that don't, you have to manually configure the software. With trial and error, you should be able to configure them. The most difficult part is selecting the hardware monitoring chip that your motherboard uses. Shuffle through the options until you see the monitor statistics change - this usually means that's the correct chip. You might have to adjust the values or bias so it will report the real value correctly.
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