Windows: System Tray Hardware Monitor Tool
CPU and Hardware Monitor Tool
Hey, my old favorite tool speedfan has stopped being developed and it’s time for a modern replacement. My main criteria is that it’s small, efficient and actively developed. I don’t really care about being able to control fan speed or CPU clock and I just want something that elegantly displays the numbers in the system tray.
As it is customary for me these days, it has to be installable by scoop, which is what all the tools I researched do.
| My new choice is Libre Hardware Monitor, and for terminal I really love btop4win |
SpeedFan is my old friend, but it’s not being developed anymore. It did a great job of monitoring temperatures and other CPU stuff, but adjusting fan speeds was its specialty, which isn’t really “in” for me anymore. So we have to move on.
AIDA64 is a really perfect program,, but it’s paid and a bit heavy for my liking. I still use it quite often because it’s been a standard on some of my computers for a while. Even though it’s easy to find license keys online, the fact that it’s not free makes me nervous because I don’t want to feel like I’m stealing it, which I am. That’s really the only reason I’m still looking for an alternative.
LibreHardwareMonitor/LibreHardwareMonitor is just what I need, implemented in the right way. It’s a fork of Open Hardware Monitor which stopped being developed. I don’t think anyone needs anything more than this; it’s not for controlling fans, but it’s great, small and simple. It has a monitor for exactly everything possible, even traffic. Awesome!
Core Temp isn’t open-source, but it’s completely free. I’ve read somewhere that the installation may contain adware, but that’s not an issue for me because I install it through scoop. It has a nice “Overheat Protection” option that lets you run any executable you want. It’s perfect for tray monitoring, but since it only does that for CPU and RAM usage and again, it’s not open-source, I’d rather go with Libre Hardware Monitor.
Fan Control | Rem0o/FanControl.Releases is a tool that uses Libre Hardware Monitor as a backend, so I’m not considering it.
aristocratos/btop4win is a command-line tool like btop or htop aka Task Manager, and it looks great. It also uses Libre Hardware Monitor as a backend and you can install it with scoop install btop-lhm.
HWMonitor is free version of premium app
Glances is a comprehensive and sophisticated application, serving as an advanced alternative to top/htop. The repository can be found at nicolargo/glances. It is multi-platform, offers a client-server mode and has a web UI, as well as a REST API. Being a Python application, installation is a breeze, with the simple command pip install glances, but it is not available on “scoop”.
Windows: Monitoring Log file Changes
file tailing, file tail utility, monitoring text log files, tracking changes in log files, debug log, or event log
As usual, the Windows has a native way but it is ugly and goes something like this: Get-Content mylog.log –Wait.
zarunbal/LogExpert is a tail program and log analyzer that you can install with scoop install logexpert. I wasn’t expecting much from this one, but it ended up being the best. It’s efficient and logical, with filtering and no unexpected problems, and I can immediately see it has regex filtering too. A real little expert.
BareTail is a free tail, with lot of up-selling, Scoop installable, that does exactly what you’d expect and it is my second choice in this ranking.
RolandPheasant/TailBlazer can be installed with Scoop and it’s a free tail for Windows. It works perfectly fine, but I find the UI a bit too modern for my taste. Let me explain: I couldn’t find the “Open” option right away, instead I had to resort to drag-and-drop the file. A bit of a hassle.
snakefoot/snaketail-net is a utility for monitoring text log files and Windows EventLog that you can install with scoop install snaketail. It’s small and it doesn’t have any filtering, and it looks like it takes the file away from the regular process I was testing with.
esrlabs/chipmunk is a log analysis tool that you can install with scoop install chipmunk, but it doesn’t do live-tailing (v2). It’s incredibly inert to start up and best avoided if you can, and I think it also takes the file away from the regular process I was testing with. All of that applied to version 2, but they have just released v3, which supports tailing. However, it is still a huge monster of 300MB, so don’t use it.
The way I tested all these tools is a bit strange. In Windows this gross and ugly one-liner is the way PowerShell can simulate writing to a log file. A ChatGPT programmer gave it to me because there’s no way I’d remember this syntax, ever:
1..999999 | Foreach-Object {Test-Connection google.com -Count 1 | Select-Object -ExpandProperty ResponseTime | Add-Content logfile.log}
Ima i novi, koji je možda i najbolji:
Stvarno rade savršeno!
tmoreno/open-log-viewer is a multi-platform log viewer built with Electron, not on scoop, that can Tail file changes.
Linux CLI alternatives to ’tail -f'
If you are looking for a Linux CLI alternative to tail -f because you don’t have a way to clear the screen with a shortcut, there are several tools that you can try.
lnav aka The Logfile Navigator is an advanced and mature log file viewer with the repository at tstack/lnav. Can be launched without any parameters on file and the shortcuts are available by pressing “?” key. To clear the screen, you can use the “G” shortcut. While it provides many options, this one option should be sufficient for your current need.
rcoh/angle-grinder is a Rust tool for slicing and dicing logs on the command line. It can be installed using the command cargo install ag. However, the installation may take a while since it compiles the file.
MultiTail is similar to the original ’tail’, but it lets you view multiple files on the same screen.
colortail is essentially the same as tail, but with colorization added. It is an official tool, but it does not offer keyboard shortcuts, so it may not provide significant additional benefits. Additionally, its colorization may not be optimized for WordPress logs.
You can use commands like tailf (deprecated) or even less to monitor log files in real-time. There are also tools like generic colorizer garabik/grc, but that serves completely different purposes.
For the equivalent of tail -f, you could use less +F logfile, or even better, less +FG logfile to jump straight to the end of the file.
System Information
scoop install aida64extreme hwinfo pci-z cpu-z
- AIDA64 is amazing, but paid
- HWiNFO je ustvari baš dobra alternativa
- CPU-Z
- PCI-Z to detect unknown PCI devices
Manuals