I’ve just received some bug reports on the softwares that I did for Lewis Accommodation. I could have debugged it with Windows running under VMWare but like always, VMWare is too slow, especially for CPU intensive jobs like compiling, beside, I’ve got a new contract to develop another software so I decided to install Windows instead.
All in all, it has been a very bad experience. For some reason, after every 1 minute or so, the CPU usage rocketed way up to 100% with frequent burst to around 50% which make the computer almost unusable for about 5 seconds. I know that 5 seconds is not much but imagine having to stop for 5 seconds every 1 minute when you are working, very annoying indeed. I think it might be because of some updates I installed from Windows Update website since consulting Windows Task Manager processes list didn’t shed any light. View the screenshot below to see what happened when the laptop is completely idle, with probably the exception of BitComet downloading a file at around 50KB/s (click on it to view full size - 1024×768).
However, there are still things to cheer about. Firstly, I fixed the bugs. Secondly, I managed to annoy my manager so much that he called the control sheet my software generated “the control shit”. Thirdly, HDDLife for Notebook. What is HDDLife for Notebook? It is a utility that allows you to view the current state of your hard drive using the S.M.A.R.T technology. There are 3 versions, a standard version which is free but limited in features, a professional version ($29) which is a lot more useful and a version for laptop ($49).
As you can see from the screenshot below (full size 1024 x 768), it allows you to view the hard drive’s performance, its running temperature, even how long your hard drive has been running (in my case it is 8092 hours), but the most valuable information is the hard drive’s health. Basically, what this mean is the chance of failure of your hard drive, you should seriously consider replacing the hard drive or at least backing up your important data if your hard drive’s health goes too low. What made this software great is that it will give you a detailed conclusion in pure & plain human language (there are currently 18 languages available) based on the result which made it easy to use even for a chimp. Having had 2 broken hard drives in the past few years, this is becoming one of my must have softwares. The only problem is that it is currently only available for Windows, hopefully BinarySense (the company behind HDDLife) will develop a Linux version soon.
When minimized, HDDLife sit comfortably on the system tray and display your hard drive’s health status or its temperature or simply just the program icon (configurable). Another very useful feature of HDDLife is that it allows the user to configure what it should do in case it detects something fishy about your hard drive which can be either turning off the computer or send a warning e-mail. Although it is extremely easy to use and designed to be user friendly, there are also features for advanced users, one of those is the feature accessible through File –> Save Report which will give the user a detailed report of what HDDLife had done. As you can see from the screenshot below, HDDLife also change your normal hard drive icon to show its current state, this icon is fully skinable. In my opinion, it is an useful feature, however, some of my friends considered it to be counter-productive, in case you disagree with me, you can always disable this feature.
Although HDDLife is an excellent software, it’s too limited in features. It might be for the sake of user-friendliness but some extra optional useful features like auto-backup periodically, in my opinion, wouldn’t hurt anyone. It is also very puzzling as to why HDDLife for Notebook costs $49, nearly double the price of HDDLife Professional. I understand that HDDLife for Notebook is fine tuned for laptop and has some extra tricks up its sleeves but $35 seems like a much more reasonable price to me.
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