What is a good tool to monitor my computer's sensors?

Question

What is a good free Windows XP tool to monitor my computer's sensors such as its temperature, fan peed, and hard disk diagnostics?

I think I remember there being a British piece of software that did this, but can't find it.

Answer 1

I've had great luck with SpeedFan, from alimco.com. It integrates pretty much everything you're looking for into a nice little free tool.

From their description:

SpeedFan is a program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T. info and show hard disk temperatures. SpeedFan supports SCSI disks too. SpeedFan can even change the FSB on some hardware (but this should be considered a bonus feature). SpeedFan can access digital temperature sensors and can change fan speeds accordingly, thus reducing noise. SpeedFan can find almost any hardware monitor chip connected to the 2-wire SMBus (System Management Bus (trademark belonging to SMIF, Inc.), a subset of the I2C protocol) and works fine with Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and Windows Vista. It works with Windows 64 bit too.

Alternately, if you use Google Desktop, there are add-ons for it that you can use to monitor the system, too.

Answer 2

I too love SpeedFan, but as an alternative, checkout CPUID's HWMonitor.

HWMonitor is a hardware monitoring program that reads PC systems main health sensors : voltages, temperatures, fans speed. The program handles the most common sensor chips, like ITE® IT87 series, most Winbond® ICs, and others. In addition, it can read modern CPUs on-die core thermal sensors, as well has hard drives temperature via S.M.A.R.T, and video card GPU temperature.