Have you ever wondered why your computer feels so hot to the touch? Perhaps, if you have a desktop, the only time you notice it is when your fan begins to spin out of control. You hear the sound and you know your system is working extra hard to keep up. If you own a laptop, no doubt you have felt how hot your computer gets when left on for an extended period.
You may even invest in cooling pad or external fan to help keep the temperature low. While this is a good idea, you can also monitor the temperature of your hard drive to take preventative steps from it overheating.
HDD Temperature is one such program. It comes in a trial, free and paid version and offers a variety of features to help monitor and alert you when your computer gets too hot. The free version of HDD Temperature offers just enough features for the majority of computer users and our guide will focus on that version.
How to use HDD Temperature
Once you have downloaded HDD Temperature and then installed it, you can begin using it to monitor and protect your computer from overheating.
Open HDD Temperature and you’ll see the main window of the program.
You have three tabs to work with to customize and get HDD Temperature working the way you need it.
The General tab is the main screen of HDD Temperature. From here, you can choose whether you want to load it from startup which is a good idea for those of us who cannot remember to open programs we might need running in the background.
You can also choose the language by clicking on the “Down arrow” to open a drop down menu…
Simply choose your language of choice and your alerts will be displayed in it.
Under the Temperature area, you can choose whether you want to display temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit.
While the western world uses Fahrenheit as its temperature of choice, it can be alarming to computer users to see how hot a hard drive actually gets.
By utilizing Celsius as your temperature, you will not have as much temperature shock when you start seeing your hard drive’s temperature heat up.
You can also choose how hot you want your hard drive to get before it alerts you. This number should be anywhere from 50 degrees Celsius to 65 degrees Celsius. This is a safe zone that allows you to react to the overheating before damage occurs to your computer’s hard drive.
Under the Temp poll, period, min: you can choose how long of a temperature reading HDD Temperature takes. For most users, 20 minutes is about the most you want to use. For those using a computer more, making this more frequency such as ten minutes or less can be more effective.
You may see some areas that are dimmed out, these are areas only available in the Pro version of HDD Temperature.
Next, click on the “on overheat” tab.
This allows you to customize how HDD Temperature alerts you to overheating.
Depending on your operating system, you can either have a message pop-up shown or a balloon hint. The balloon hint can be used in all versions of Windows, but it is the only type of alert you can use in Windows XP and 2000. You can choose which alert you like and change it at any time depending on how useful they are to you.
This is the pop-up that will appear upon overheat.
While this is the balloon alert that will appear upon overheat.
In the Pro version of HDD Temperature, you can opt to have network messages or e-mails sent as well when your computer overheats.
Now, click “Tray Icon.”
This lets you choose the color scheme for the tray icon for HDD Temperature. At all times, you can have a tray icon that alerts you to the current temperature reading for your computer’s hard drive.
The color scheme will all depend on the colors of your theme and taskbar. You can still receive alerts to overheating, this just makes it more visible for you to see the temperature on your own.
Take a look in your taskbar and you will see the tray icon for HDD Temperature. It will be giving you the current temperature of your computer’s hard drive.
If you right-click the tray icon, you can access HDD Temperature’s home page, its settings along with register the Pro version of the software.
You can also opt to shut down HDD Temperature and its monitoring by clicking Exit.
How effective is HDD Temperature?
HDD Temperature, in its free version, is efficient and effective to monitor and alert you of your computer’s hard drive temperature. Many computer users take for granted that their computer just keeps running and often neglect taking steps to make it cooler. An overheated hard drive can cause data loss, performance issues and even destroy the hard drive over time.These outcomes can be devastating to a computer user and preventing them, especially with a laptop, should always be a priority.
By using HDD Temperature to monitor and alert you of heat issues, you are taking a step to ensure you can shut off your computer, keep it cool and keep it running smoothly in the future.
