Computer, know thyself

Rafe Needleman CNET

Published: 19 Sep 2005

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My Saab has an unusual feature on its dashboard: a button labelled Black Panel turns off the lighting on all of the car's instruments and readouts except the speedometer and the clock. The idea is that you press this button when you're driving at night to reduce the distractions coming at you from things like the tachometer, the fuel gauge and the radio station display. The car is smart enough to turn on a gauge if it needs attention -- for example, if your fuel level gets low, the fuel gauge will light up.

It's cool to drive along at night with nothing illuminated in your line of vision except the speedometer. It's like driving a Swedish-made 1968 VW Beetle. But what people like me really want is not Black Panel but More Panel.

I'd like to know the oil pressure in my car, which my Saab doesn't tell me. I'd also like to know the tyre inflation pressures, the transmission temperature and other data, too. Why? Because I want to know why my machine is working the way it is, and I don't completely trust product designers who think that flashing a warning light once things have started to break is sufficient notice.

You know where this is going: I like keeping tabs on my computer, as well. And lately my obsession with creating a 'dashboard' for my PC has got a little out of hand. You'll see what I mean when I describe the latest dashboard products I've been experimenting with. Here they are, in ascending order of geekiness.

Google Desktop

Google Desktop is an important product: it's Google's first general-purpose application with a persistent desktop presence. The company's other Windows applications -- Picasa and Google Earth -- are special-purpose programs and not nearly as 'in your face' as this one. The Google Desktop beta includes a Sidebar application similar to the one Microsoft showed us a while ago for its upcoming Windows Vista operating system, but it's here today.

The Google Sidebar does a lot of useful things, such as showing your latest email headers, RSS feeds (automatically updated based on sites you visit -- slick), news, stock data, weather and so on. It will also show you random pictures from your hard disk (although if that's what you really want, I recommend the brand-new application called Slide instead). There's also a downloadable plug-in that will monitor your system and show your CPU loading, network traffic, disk throughput and memory use.

The Google Desktop Sidebar is the easiest way to get into the dashboard thing. It's a beta version, but it's easy to install and use, and the information feeds that it displays are useful. If general information is what you're looking for, Google Desktop is a killer solution. But if you find the level of detail lacking on the system information, keep reading.

Yahoo Konfabulator

Yahoo recently bought the company Pixoria, maker of the wonderful Konfabulator product. Konfabulator enables your desktop to show 'widgets', much like Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger does with its Dashboard feature. The first thing you notice about widgets is that they are gorgeous, in contrast to the functional and plain Google Desktop (they also take up a lot of system resources).

However, if you want to keep a close eye on your system, some handy widgets will display useful information, such as your system's battery charge state, Wi-Fi signal strength (and the name of the network you're connected to), CPU loading (either instantaneous or graphed over time), memory use, the name of your most resource-intensive application and many other esoteric system stats.

Like Google Desktop, Konfabulator excels at showing non-system data such as newsfeeds, the weather, a clock (the selection is mind-boggling), the current phase of the moon and so on.

I use Konfabulator on my desktop to show CPU load as well as to display the weather and newsfeeds on my second monitor. On my notebook, I monitor battery state and Wi-Fi strength. All very handy, but not quite enough for the true system fetishist.

Close to the metal: MBM and SpeedFan

If you really want to know what's happening on your system, you need an application that can read all of your computer's sensors. For that, try Motherboard Monitor or my pick, SpeedFan. SpeedFan will report temperatures from the various sensors in your PC, as well as the speed of various cooling fans. You can also collect information on the temperature of your video card, the health of your hard disks and the voltages inside your system (which is interesting if you are an overclocker or if your system throttles the CPU when it's idle).

A tool like SpeedFan can really help you see under the bonnet of your PC. However, unless you're building your own computer or need to wring every last bit of speed out of your system, SpeedFan is more interesting than useful. But you know what? It's still not enough.

Get a real dashboard with an external display

The problem with all of the above tools is that they show their data on your PC's monitor, cluttering up your display. Now, granted, if you have a wide-screen LCD or two monitors, you probably have some extra space, but it is somewhat inelegant to put all this geeky data on your screen alongside your work.

If you've come this far, what you need is an external display, such as one from Matrix Orbital. This can reveal all the information discussed above on a separate display mounted either in a drive bay in your computer's case (tower users only) or in an external enclosure if you have a notebook or if you want the display on your desk. A lot of multimedia PCs come with these displays, and in addition to showing media information (what's playing, for example), they can show system data such as temperature, fan speed and so on. They also make nice, if hugely expensive, digital clocks. Once you set up one of these external displays, you can move all the dashboard data off your monitors to clean your system.

Getting an external display up and running is very easy (just plug it into a USB port), but you'll probably want to tweak the default settings a bit. And you'll still need either MBM or SpeedFan installed to send sensor data to the display, so be prepared to spend some time messing about with it.

Can it get more ridiculous?

Oh yes, it can. So far I've described tools that monitor your system. But SpeedFan, the Matrix Orbital system (with its included LCDC software), and dozens of other products can also control your computer's innards -- mostly adjusting fan speeds and turning on indicator lights. Sure, most computers do a fine job of running themselves, but where's the fun in that? Might as well drive a Beetle.

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