SpeedFan 4.42 is an extremely powerful tool

If you are trying to figure out why your pc hangs when under heavy load or after some hours of usage, you need a tool that can change your computer's fan speeds, read the temperatures of your motherboard and your hard disk, read voltages and fan speeds and check the status of your hard disk using S.M.A.R.T. or SCSI attributes, then SpeedFan is the software to go. SpeedFan is a freeware program that monitors fan speeds, temperatures and voltages in computers with hardware monitoring chips. It is fully configurable and you can create custom events to handle every situation in an automated way. SpeedFan works under Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, 2003, XP, Vista and Windows 7. SpeedFan works fine on 64 bit too.

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. 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 monitoring software, but its main feature is that it can control the speed of the fans (depending on your sensor chip) according to the temperatures inside your pc, thus reducing noise and power consumption. Several devices support fan speed changing, but the motherboard must include some specific circuitry.

SpeedFan is an extremely powerful tool. It can help you a lot to find the reasons for an unpredictable reboot or for a failing hard disk. It can tell you whether you are likely to experience temperature related issues and can help you to greatly reduce the noise at work or while watching a movie. But this great power requires access to a lot of resources on your motherboard and it might be that your hardware does not like such kind of access. SpeedFan is used worldwide since 2000 and there are so many happy users out there, but you should always remember that no program can be perfect and that I can't be held responsible if SpeedFan causes any damage to your system.