CoolMenu provides hardware monitoring for the following chipsets:
- LM78
- LM79
- WinBond W83781D
It does not currently work with Windows NT. However expect future releases of CoolMenu to provide greater hardware and operating system coverage. CoolMenu only monitors the current state of the motherboard hardware sensors and changes the colour of the Hardware Panels on CoolMenu. It does not provide an alarm!
Check the box to turn hardware monitoring on or off and select how often the monitoring occurs from the drop-down list.
Drag and position the sliders to set the threshold values for temprature and fan speed. When setting tempratures:
- Set Blue low enough to indicate a colder than usual start for the system.
- Use Aqua to denote the temprature change as the system is starting up.
- Have Green span the usual operating range.
- Yellow should indicate the temprature is rising higher than normal.
- And Red to indicate that the system is beyond it's safe operating temprature.
Setting the slider for fan speed is similar but this time you are looking for a drop in the value:
- Green again denotes the usual operating range, but set the lower value to as near to usual speed as possible. This way is the fan starts to slow slightly you'll notice the panel change to Yellow.
- Yellow should cover a speed range which is below normal but still adequate to cool the system.
- Magenta should be set around the range where the fan is obviously starting to fail.
- Red indicates that the fan is seriously slowing down and unable to provide sufficient cooling.
- And finally Black will indicate that the fan has failed.
The Setup... button opens the form shown below. This lets you setup hardware monitoring specifically for your system.
- On a few systems the Chipset has to be restarted before monitoring.
- If all sensors report N/A as above CoolMenu is not able to provide Hardware Monitoring on this system.
- The System, CPU and Fan monitoring panels can be set to display the value from 1 of 3 possible sensors. Check the reading the BIOS reports on system startup to determine which is which.
- The Fan has a couple of other parameter that can be set
- Pulses indicates the number of pulses sent during each revolution of the fan (most send only 1).
- Division Factor in most cases this can be left at Auto. For slower fans which are not reporting a value set it to 4 or higher.
