ALL MECHANICAL products require maintenance to keep them running. You get your truck or car serviced at regular intervals to ensure that failing parts are spotted and replaced, while tuning the engine to improve performance and efficiency, so why not your PC too?
In this feature, we’ve developed a simple program to help you ensure that your PC’s hardware is running as well as it possibly can. We’ll start by showing you how to audit your system so you can identify everything that’s in it, from the stuff you should already know about (like your graphics card model or CPU), to more obscure components (what USB controllers is your motherboard using, for instance?).
From there, we’ll put in place tools that can help you monitor your system, providing you with early warnings for the parts that may be on their way out, from ageing hard drives to batteries in a state of decline. You’ll learn how to identify other potential problems through stress-testing, before we switch our attention to examining ways to tune your hardware for better performance, from basic updates to judicious overclocking of selected components.
Ready to put your PC through its paces? Let’s get started.
THE FIRST STEP to maintaining your PC is to perform a complete hardware audit. This provides you with a detailed inventory of the various components that make up your PC—including the chipsets that populate your motherboard, allowing you to monitor key aspects of them.
Our current tool of choice is HWiNFO (www.hwinfo.com), which is free for personal use, and can be installed or deployed as a portable app. After setting it up, launch HWiNFO and give it administrator access when prompted. You’ll be prompted to start the app, which comprises three main windows: Main, Summary, and Sensors (you can tell HWiNFO which windows to display on startup).
Once your system has been profiled, the Summary screen will display a threepaned window presenting information about your CPU, motherboard, and GPU. This provides quite detailed information about all three components—for example, the CPU pane displays your processor model, its TDP (thermal
