Windows 7 Why dosent WIN 7 monitor CPU temps

[toolpusher]

Hi

My win 7 quad core PC suddenly started shutting down without warning yesterday. I thought this might be temperature related so downloaded a small utility to monitor fan speeds and CPU temps. I was amazed to see that when idling my intel CPU was up about 50C and when I gave the PC anything to do it steadily increased until the PC shutdown. On investigation I found the fault to be the dreaded dust totally blocking the fins of the heat sink, after a good clean and blow out the CPU temps are now all steady around 40C even when the PC is working hard.

The app I used was less the 2mb in size and surely something similar could have been built into win 7. Not sure how long I have been stressing the CPU needlessly but I am sure I will have taken a few years of its life span. Even a simple alarm in Win 7 telling you your CPU is running hot would do. Maybe its built into Win7 & but not normally activated anyone know?

regards

TP

 

[Mike]

Nope. While you can determine the resource usage through Reliability and Performance Monitor for most things, such as CPU, Hard Drive, Memory, Network you cannot use Windows to check temperature settings. Something like SpeedFan will let you do this for free. Lavalys Everest is a tried and true app. that successfully makes "System Information" look like it was programmed by a novice. I suspect they have shyed away from this area for some reason or another, but I am not sure why. It is possible that the thought process may be that the motherboard and CPU manufacturers should be responsible for providing this type of software.

It is also nice to see very well written software that can be used to garnish all of the system information you may need written by a 3rd party instead of an incomplete solution by MS. Its possible they realize any development of this type of thing will appeal to the people-who-know-what they-are-doing crowd, but not the majority of their customers. After all, many people do not even know the significance of CPU temperatures, and the TJ Maxx (the point at which your CPU literally melts itself into oblivion) is vastly different for each processor. When building Windows if something like this takes away from development time for other features (like making the whole OS perform better overall) they have a limited amount of resources on what they will work on during the development phase.

I suspect you will see a lot of free software come out when EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) supplants the standard old BIOS. One unspoken rule is that the less interaction the OS needs to have with the BIOS the better. I would like to see a working computer or server running EFI instead of a standard BIOS but have yet to see it firsthand - only screenshots.

 

[toolpusher]

Hi Mike

Thanks for the info and I can see from your post thats its OK to name 3 party software on this forum. I am now using Core Temp. Great small free utility, you can use just the utility or also download a smart windows gadget as well. Core Temp reckons the Tj.Max for my intel core 2 Quad Q6600 is 85C which I am sure I was approaching yesterday. So I have been very lucky . You can also set alarms for overheating and even use it to shutdown your PC if required at a set temp which is great for unattended PC's like mine. Well worth a look, just search for Core Temp in Google.

regards

TP