While I am now doing some serious .NET work I am finding myself blogging more about non-programming topics. I subscribe to many RSS feeds, including the aggregation provided by
.NET Developers Blog. I read a post yesterday by
Andre Cruz about software for monitoring system temperatures.
I was accustomed to this kind of system monitoring software being provided with the motherboard drivers for all my desktop computers but my laptop did not include anything like this. Looking at the laptops of different brands used by my colleagues this seems to be a common oversight by laptop manufacturers.
Thankfully, the
MobileMeter software mentioned in the blog provides the perfect solution. It utilises ACPI to display all the temperatures available from the system which includes processor and hard drive on my laptop and also several others on other laptops. It also shows current processor speed (I was surprised how low it drops on some of my battery power modes) and even the current battery charge or discharge rate in Watts.
The best feature however is that I can not only set the MobileMeter window to be always on top and very transparent, it will also allow all mouse operations on the window to pass through to underlying objects as though the window wasn’t there at all. This is the best system tool I have encountered since
Sysinternal’s Process Explorer.