Computer Information Software
Computer information software provides an in-depth tool for finding information about your computer. Using computer information software is useful when troubleshooting an issue or deciding components to upgrade. It also provides a reliable way to monitor various aspects of your computers health, such as fan speeds, temperatures, and hard drive health.
There are many paid and free programs available for finding out specific information about the components or performance of your computer. The information these programs collect and report vary from a broad view of the entire computer to specific analysis of an individual component type, such as graphics processors, hard drives, and temperature monitoring.
Benchmarking software
Benchmarking software analyzes your computers overall performance and determines a computers performance score. Using this number, you can compare your computer’s performance against other users of the program who have submitted results. Popular benchmarking software includes FutureMark’s PCMark and 3DMark series of programs. If you are looking to just obtain data about your graphics processing capabilities, Ozone3D’s FurMark software offers scalable testing of any video configuration.
Processor and System Information
System information programs, such as Lavalys’ AIDA64 and CPUID’s CPU-Z, PerfMonitor, HWMonitor and TMonitor, provide information on nearly every aspect of your computer’s internal components, drivers and software. These programs can provide information when troubleshooting computer errors, determining performance bottlenecks in your computer setup and monitoring component conditions, like clock speeds and temperatures, when changing your computer’s components, cooling or settings.
Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology Tools
If you are looking for a way to monitor hard disk drive health, SMART tools, like EFD Software’s HD Tune software, monitor conditions stored on your hard disk drives such as bad-sector counts, seek errors, and re-allocated sectors to provide an estimate of your drive’s overall health and help to predict drive failure. These tools can provide vital warnings to help keep your data safe and allow you to replace your drives before total failure occurs. While many Operating Systems include basic SMART monitoring functionality, they typically only inform you if a critical error has occurred. Often, by the time these errors are occurring, it may be too late to save your data.