10 suggestions

[stillwater]

Hi, first of all I want to say how impressed I am with aida64. I've used it since about 2009 to display sensor stats on my logitech keyboard LCD. I've recently started using it for more, such as sensor panels on both my PCs and stability tests, and I'm loving it. I keep discovering more features, and the more I discover about the program, the more impressed I am. Great work.

 

Anyway, even good things can be improved, and I have some suggestions.

1. allow hard drives with A: or B: letters to be monitored eg. my backup hard drive was called B: (B for Backup), but unfortunately Aida didn't recognise it until I renamed to a different letter
   
2. allow moving of sensor elements even when sensor manager is open
   
3. allow user to customise value types: eg. let me choose whether to display 1546 Mhz, 1.546 Ghz, 1.55 Ghz or 1.5 Ghz
   
4. allow cpu, chassis etc. fans to be displayed not just as rpm, but also as a percentage value (ie.  Full speed = 100%). Make user input min and max if necessary
   
5. allow graphs to be capped, so that line doesn't go off the chart. Eg. My Fraps graph makes most sense when capped at 120hz. But when I play an older game with vsync off, the fps can be much higher, and the line shoots off the graph and messes up the rest of the sensor panel.
   
6. let sensor panel manager window remember its last location
   
7. Allow values to have multiple colour states, just like bars do at the moment: eg. CPU temparature:  30ËšC  or  55ËšC  or 96ËšC
   
8. Allow fan speeds to be controlled. Perhaps introduce a new "Item Type" called Slider or Button or Interactive
   
9. Save settings when closing preferences or Sensor Panel manager, not just when closing aida64.
   
10. Allow each item on sensor panel to have its own polling interval setting that overrides the generic ones. Eg. I'd like to poll Fraps framerate every 0.1 seconds, GPU usage every 1 second, "used RAM" every 5 seconds, motherboard temperature every 30 seconds, and "used HDD space" every 360 seconds. Everything else can be left at the defaults that I've specified in preferences.
    

[Fiery]

Thank you for your suggestions.

 

1) It's not an easy thing to do, since many PCs still have a floppy drive installed -- or a floppy drive configured in the BIOS Setup, but no drive connected.  And when polling drive A: and drive B:, it could mean a few seconds delay everytime AIDA64 collects hardware monitor items  We'll try to come up with a workaround to make it possible though.

 

2) We don't allow that because it would require additional synchronization between the SensorPanel and the SensorPanel Manager.  Technically it would be difficult to implement, and would bring not that much additional flexibility for users.  Especially since using the arrow buttons it is already possible to move items via the SensorPanel Manager.

 

5) Auto-scaling was implemented for that reason.  We don't have plans to make the graphs configuration even more complicated though

 

6) It should already remember its location.

 

8) Controlling fans is not on our roadmap.  We'd like to keep AIDA64 a "read-only" utility that isn't supposed to alter your hardware or software configuration.  I know, there're exceptions of course, like the disk write benchmarks

 

9) Settings are saved when you close the Preferences with the OK key, or when you press the Apply button.  Altering some of the settings will however require you to restart AIDA64.  SensorPanel Manager will save settings everytime you change something, you don't even have to close the SensorPanel Manager window to have everything in sync and settings saved.

 

10) I'm afraid it is not possible, since the hardware monitor module of AIDA64 is not as flexible as to allow very different update frequencies to be used for individual items.

 

As for the rest of the ideas, we've noted them down, and so sometime in the future we may get to the point to implement them

 

 

Thanks,

Fiery

[stillwater]

Thanks for responding/considering my suggestions.  

 

(8) Seems like a lost opportunity to me. I'd love to have aida as my one-stop-shop for all hardware monitoring and tweaking. I'd prefer not to have to run multiple utilities at once. Also, the UI of SpeedFan (the current best program for controlling fans) is very complicated and unintuitive. I'm sure you could implement a better one, and I'd expect you to get more customers if you did, as many of us use Speedfan only because there's no alternative. Though I guess you know what's best for your roadmap.

 

(9) Are you sure? I find that settings only save for the current session only unless I manually quit aida. I've noticed a few times when I've made changes, they've been applied....but then later I've restarted Windows (without manually closing aida), and upon re-entering Windows, the changes I had made had been lost. If I manually close aida after making changes, they seem to be saved permanently.

 

 

 

 

Anyway, I have a few more suggestions:

 

(11) Monitor HDD activity  Sometimes I can hear one of my hard drives spinning loudly, but I have no idea why, or which one it is. I wish I could just look at my aida sensor panel and see straight away which one it is (and perhaps whether it's reading or writing)

 

(12) Stop the sensor panel disappearing when I do "Show Desktop". This is probably my greatest annoyance with aida. When my monitors are full of open windows, I'd like to be able to click the Windows "Show desktop" button to quickly check something on the Sensor Panel.  But currently, the Sensor Panel disappears along with all the other windows. A "keep visible on Show Desktop" checkbox would be great. I know the "always on top" feature exists, but I definitely don't want the SP to be always on top (just always visible when looking at the desktop)

 

(13) Allow drag-drop of items on the sensor panel manager. I currently have about 80 items on my SP. Keeping organised by arranging them is very time-consuming, because the "move up/down" buttons only move them one position at a time. I'd like to be able to just drag them into any position on the list I want.

 

(14) Be able to show refresh rates for multiple monitors. I have 2 monitors, with different refresh rates that sometimes change independently of each other. Aida's current "Refresh Rate" sensor isn't very helpful, because it only works for one monitor (and it's not immediately apparent which one).

 

(15) Allow monitoring of estimated Power Draw (in Watts) of GPUs, and not just their TDP%

 

 

 

Thanks again.

[Soul--Reaver]

(8) Though i can understand Fiery, i do think its a shame. I really hate AI Suite but cannot get rid of it since there isn't a program available that can replace it. Speedfan can only see a small portion of the temperature sensors on my Sabertooth Z77/Z87 and is unable to control the assistant fans. Aida64 can see all the temperatures and fans but is missing the functionality to control the fans.

[stillwater]

 

(12) Stop the sensor panel disappearing when I do "Show Desktop". This is probably my greatest annoyance with aida. When my monitors are full of open windows, I'd like to be able to click the Windows "Show desktop" button to quickly check something on the Sensor Panel.  But currently, the Sensor Panel disappears along with all the other windows. A "keep visible on Show Desktop" checkbox would be great. I know the "always on top" feature exists, but I definitely don't want the SP to be always on top (just always visible when looking at the desktop)

 

 

Could someone please tell me if this has this been fixed yet? My license period expired, so I no longer have updates. I'm deciding whether to renew, as this is the main feature I'm interested in at the moment.

[Fiery]

Could someone please tell me if this has this been fixed yet? My license period expired, so I no longer have updates. I'm deciding whether to renew, as this is the main feature I'm interested in at the moment.

We're working on it It should be available before the end of July as a new stable update for AIDA64. I'll let you know in this topic once a new AIDA64 update with the requested feature is available for download.

[stillwater]

Cool, thanks. I'll check this periodically

[Fiery]

Before the new stable update is out, you can try the new option in the latest AIDA64 Extreme beta:

http://www.aida64.com/downloads/aida64engineerbuild3046y3r8cmsztnzip

After upgrading to this new version, make sure to restart Windows to finalize the upgrade.

Let me know how it works Please note that after altering the new option (AIDA64 / main menu / File / Preferences / Hardware Monitoring / SensorPanel / Prevent SensorPanel from being minimized) you need to restart AIDA64 to apply the changes.

[stillwater]

Thanks. I've just bought an upgrade, and the no-minimise functionality works as intended. 

 

I wish this program wasn't so expensive, but it's the best on the market, so it's hard to say no...

[stillwater]

ah, dammit, I just found a bug. The new no-minimise functionality doesn't work on "Aero Peek" (hovering over the "show desktop" corner button without clicking it) in Windows 7. This is actually the most important situation for the sensor panel to remain visible in my opinion, because it would let you quickly see your stats and then get immediately back to work

 

Looks like I spent my $40 too soon :/

[Fiery]

I'm afraid we haven't yet found a way to display SensorPanel when using Aero Peek. I'm not even sure if that's possible to do...

[stillwater]

oh, ok. I assumed you could do it since you do it with the gadget. Btw, why are the gadget and sensor panel separate things? Is the gadget architecture too limited to do what the sensor panel can do?

 

Anyway, Aero Peek would be nice, since it's exactly the sort of thing that Aero Peek was designed for, but I can live without it. I'm happy enough to be able to see it with "show desktop"

[Fiery]

oh, ok. I assumed you could do it since you do it with the gadget. Btw, why are the gadget and sensor panel separate things? Is the gadget architecture too limited to do what the sensor panel can do?

The Desktop Gadget subsystem has been removed from Windows 8.x, and most likely it won't be restored in Windows 10. While the AIDA64 SensorPanel is completely independent from the underlying operating system and its capabilities.

[Dutch]

oh, ok. I assumed you could do it since you do it with the gadget. Btw, why are the gadget and sensor panel separate things? Is the gadget architecture too limited to do what the sensor panel can do?

 

You can use gadgets in win8/8.1 with http://8gadgetpack.net/, but for Aida64, the SensorPanel is so much more powerful and capable, it's like night & day.

[Fiery]

We've implemented disk activity measurement in the latest AIDA64 beta update available at:

http://www.aida64.com/downloads/latesta64xebeta

Please note that the Performance tab of Windows Task Manager seems to measure the read and write speeds not in the classic MB/s or GB/s measurement units. It uses a divisor of 1000 instead of 1024, and that leads to displaying higher values than AIDA64. We stick to using the classic divisor and classic interpretation of MB/s and GB/s.

Also note that the current hardware monitor module of AIDA64 supports up to 10 disk drives when measuring disk activity. If you have more drives and would like us to expand the limit of 10 drives, let me know.