Speedfan in Windows 7

One of the cool things about Windows 7 (henceforth referred to as Win7, because it's full of win) is the cleaned up system tray. That's the group of icons in the lower right hand corner that indicate various programs that are running in the background, as well as some system functions. In previous versions of Windows, this area could get a little crowded. Even with 'hide inactive icons' enabled, programs tended to make themselves visible most of the time.

Win7 is very protective of the system tray. As such you can tell most program icons to take a hike. Extra icons are stored in a pop-up menu. In this menu is the link to customize what icons are allowed in the tray and when. For most programs the 'Only Show Notifications' options is good. This means the icon will only show up if it has a notification for you. By selecting 'Show Icon and Notifications', you keep an icon always visible in the tray.

Other than the default icons, I only allow one app to show an icon there. What is it? I spoiled the surprise by putting it in the title. Speedfan is a application that lets you monitor the sensors in your computer. Things like CPU temp, fan speeds, and even GPU temp are logged by Speedfan. You can set it to display in the tray whatever stats you want. I have it set up to display my CPU temp to keep an eye on a questionable heatsink.

So what makes it so cool in Win7? The color scheme for the system icons is all white. It looks very nice in the Aero Glass interface. Speedfan lets you set the tray icon stats to plain white text, and it looks like it was meant to be there. Have a look:

Cool, right? It's the little things in Win7 that warm my geeky heart. You can get Speedfan here. Works perfectly fine in past versions of Windows as well.