I lost count of how many applications in Windows provide the functionality to display the temperature of the CPU. I have been using Speedfan for this purpose for well over two years by now but have to admit that Speedfan does not make it that easy to find out which temperature belongs to which component [...]

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We always try to lower our CPU usage as much as possible for a normal use. Still, there are situations like testing purposes when we may want our CPU to be 100% busy to test its behavior. This is usually tightly related to overclocking and probing the CPU cooling system capability along with it. Of course you can always use benchmarking applications to give your system some harsh time but it’s not necessary when you know how to increase CPU load all the way up to 100% easily in a few seconds. Note that this has only been tested on single-core computers, it prolly won’t work with multi-core CPUs.

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Did you ever have the feeling that your computer is making to much noises when it is running ? A high noise level can be distracting to say the least reducing work effectiveness. The worst effect: it could make you ill. I’m going to identify the most annoying pc noise makers and suggest ways to reduce the overall noise level of your computer.

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RivaTuner is a freeware tweak utility for NVIDIA and ATI based video cards. I have been using RivaTuner for a while to reduce the fan speed of my video card to decrease the noise level. I configured it to decrease the fan speed to 25% in 2D mode which includes all applications such as word processing and internet surfing. This is the lowest setting that is possible and it did reduce the fan speed so that the video card is almost silent.

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