FanControl, my take on a SpeedFan replacement

[Rem0o]

1 minute ago, Nefcairon said:

Rem0o: FanControl seems to not shutdown correctly. The system tray icon stays until my mouse points over it... Then it vanishes.

 

That's Windows for you.  It's a common tray icon bug. There's nothing I can really do about it.  The app is actually closed if you look in the process section of the task manager, but the tray icon section doesn't update until an event like a mouse hover happens.

[Jgj0UQdW]

Is there any way to run this program completely hidden with no tray icon? I don't like having tray icons even in the hidden area, particularly for things I don't need to interact with. It would be great to have this silent in the background like a service once I'm done configuring it.

[Rem0o]

48 minutes ago, 1598032785 said:

Is there any way to run this program completely hidden with no tray icon? I don't like having tray icons even in the hidden area, particularly for things I don't need to interact with. It would be great to have this silent in the background like a service once I'm done configuring it.

Well, it's not built as a service, so no, you need at least a point of interaction. A tray icon is the standard way of doing a background application in Windows.

 

And if it was, you would still need the UI to configure it once and then start the service separately, so that would be two different executables. Isn't that overly complicated to avoid a simple tray icon?

[Jgj0UQdW]

56 minutes ago, Rem0o said:

Well, it's not built as a service, so no, you need at least a point of interaction. A tray icon is the standard way of doing a background application in Windows.

 

And if it was, you would still need the UI to configure it once and then start the service separately, so that would be two different executables. Isn't that overly complicated to avoid a simple tray icon?

Perhaps a --silent command line flag to run it in the background? I could run without the flag to configure and then set the startup task to use the flag. That seems like the simplest way to do it.

[Adrenalina]

9 hours ago, 1598032785 said:

Is there any way to run this program completely hidden with no tray icon?

Yes, I believe you can.  Launch Windows Task Scheduler. (One way to launch it is to right-click the "This PC" desktop icon and then click Manage in the menu that pops up.)  Disable the FanControl task that you created when you ran the Register_Startup_Task.cmd file that comes with FanControl.  Create a new task that (1) triggers every time Windows starts, (2) runs "whether user is logged on or not" and (3) has FanControl.exe as its action (including the full path to where FanControl.exe is located).  Be sure to check the checkbox "Run with highest privileges" and uncheck the checkbox "Stop the task if it runs longer than 3 days." (The latter checkbox is located in the task's Settings tab.)

 

Keep in mind that, as currently designed, FanControl doesn't automatically check for new updates if you don't display its gui window.

[Jgj0UQdW]

1 hour ago, Adrenalina said:

Yes, I believe you can.  Launch Windows Task Scheduler. (One way to launch it is to right-click the "This PC" desktop icon and then click Manage in the menu that pops up.)  Disable the FanControl task that you created when you ran the Register_Startup_Task.cmd file that comes with FanControl.  Create a new task that (1) triggers every time Windows starts, (2) runs "whether user is logged on or not" and (3) has FanControl.exe as its action (including the full path to where FanControl.exe is located).  Be sure to check the checkbox "Run with highest privileges" and uncheck the checkbox "Stop the task if it runs longer than 3 days." (The latter checkbox is located in the task's Settings tab.)

 

Keep in mind that, as currently designed, FanControl doesn't automatically check for new updates if you don't display its gui window.

That's an impressively obscure workaround and it does exactly what I wanted. Thanks for the help.

[Adrenalina]

21 hours ago, Nefcairon said:

The small difference of 40° to 41° is negligible. The graph shows a difference of roundabout 0,1% in AFR. It is not about the fact that your hard drive once is over 40°, it is about your hard drive is *always* or at average at this temperature.  

My third link says "optimum temperature range of 37 °C to 46 °C". I have not found any comment whatsoever on the web so far that anything below 45° is a problem.

I don't know why you focused on the difference between 40C and 41C.

 

I agree that it's not about the drive getting a few degrees warm "once" (or a few times).  But I don't agree that it's about "always" or "average."  I assume it's about a substantial fraction of the time.  For example, it would be unwise to run a hard drive at 30C two thirds of the time and 50C one third of the time, which would be hot a substantial fraction of the time yet wouldn't trigger your "always or average" formula.

 

It's also about the size and frequency of temperature deltas.

 

Although your third link says the optimum range is 37C to 46C, it wrongly cites the Google study for that claim.  Nowhere in the Google study did I find a suggestion of an optimal range, or 37C, or 46C.  Any idea where they got that range, or where you got your 35C-45C range?

 

Regardless of your not finding comments about temperatures below 45C, the charts I posted show failure rate increases with temperature at temperatures lower than the temperature my drive reached (42C) when FanControl stopped reading the drive sensor.  I prefer relying on such data, not on rules of thumb based on who-knows-what assumptions and tradeoffs.

 

It's too bad there's no failure rate versus temperature data available for drives as old as the hard drive I wrote about, which is over 12 years old. (Seagate 3.5" SATA, 7200 rpm.)

[Nefcairon]

On 8/21/2020 at 5:02 PM, Adrenalina said:

 

 

The acronym AFR means Annualized Failure Rate.

This Graphs has the lowest AFR values between 35 and 46 celcius. 

[TopJimmy]

LOVE this app. Having some issues with waking from sleep. The app doesn't wake up and apply. I need to shut it down in task manager and open it again to apply fan curves or reboot. Anyone else?

[Adrenalina]

4 hours ago, Nefcairon said:

This graph has the lowest AFR values between 35 and 46 celsius.

No.  By definition, there can be only one "lowest" value, and the values in the range 35C to 46C are not equally low.  The graph has the lowest AFR value at 38C.

 

The values in the range 37-39 are all lower than the values at 35,36,40,41,42,43,44,45.  So by your "reasoning" one might say: The graph has the lowest AFR values between 37 and 39 celsius.

 

Furthermore, the AFR curve has no sharp changes at the two temperatures where you imply it does, at 35 or at 46.

 

Note also how the statistical error bars in the AFR graph grow taller toward the left and right tails of the bell-shaped bar chart that's also in the graph. (I presume the bar chart shows the number of hard drives at each average temperature, and thus the error bars are taller at the tails due to fewer data points at the tails.)  It's a reasonable guess that the two AFR values around 45C that are strangely lower than the AFR value at 43C are probably errors and the actual values there (if there were many more data points there) would probably be around the top of their error bars.

[TopJimmy]

In a future update can we get an option to change the Display icon Temperature digit color? White is hard to see.

[Rem0o]

Update 46

 

The startup task is now integrated into the app itself as a setting.

 

https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases/releases/tag/V46

[Mark Kaine]

So question, is this like normal software now,  no "expiry date" or forced updates (OTA)?

[Rem0o]

4 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

So question, is this like normal software now,  no "expiry date" or forced updates (OTA)?

Yup.

[Mark Kaine]

19 minutes ago, Rem0o said:

Yup.

Nice.  It looks really useful. I currently somehow managed to set my fans how I want, but it was very difficult and tedious and I sure had wished I had such a program when I did. 

 

But who knows how it is when I get a new motherboard at some point - I know I shortly had a tomahawk max that refused to do *anything* what I set in BIOS for example - then this program should come very handy

 

 

[Adrenalina]

On 8/24/2020 at 9:58 PM, Rem0o said:

Update 46

The startup task is now integrated into the app itself as a setting.

 

Does the new startup task start FanControl as a background service when Windows starts, or does it behave like previous versions and start FanControl when the user logs in?  At GitHub you wrote "Starts with Windows" which makes it sound like it's no longer designed to start when the user logs in.

 

For those of us running a previous version of FanControl, who already have a FanControl startup task in Windows Task Scheduler, should we leave the new option set to Off?

 

Will the new version of FanControl delete the old startup task if the new option is Off?  Will it delete the startup task if the option is changed from On to Off?

Edited August 26, 2020 by Adrenalina

[Rem0o]

1 minute ago, Adrenalina said:

 

Does the new startup task start FanControl as a background service when Windows starts, or does it behave like previous versions and start FanControl when the user logs in?  At GitHub you wrote "Starts with Windows" which makes it sound like it's no longer designed to start when the user logs in.

 

For those of us running a previous version of FanControl, who already have a FanControl startup task in Windows Task Scheduler, should we leave the new option off?  Will the new version of FanControl delete the old startup task?

It simply wraps the old one, it behave exactly the same.

[Adrenalina]

18 minutes ago, Rem0o said:

It simply wraps the old one, it behave exactly the same.

Do you mean it only wraps the Register cmd, and doesn't wrap the Unregister cmd?  So that changing the new option to Off won't delete the existing task?

 

What's the default setting of the new option?

[Rem0o]

35 minutes ago, Adrenalina said:

Do you mean it only wraps the Register cmd, and doesn't wrap the Unregister cmd?  So that changing the new option to Off won't delete the existing task?

 

What's the default setting of the new option?

It wraps the same task the scripts were creating/deleting. It is not using the scripts.It uses Win32 stuff to manage the task. If you had that task already created when you updated, the setting will be "on" and vice-versa, as it only reflects the state of the task scheduler.

Ticking/unticking the option will create/delete the task.

[Adrenalina]

5 minutes ago, Rem0o said:

It wraps the same task the scripts were creating/deleting. It is not using the scripts.It uses Win32 stuff to manage the task. If you had that task already created when you updated, the setting will be "on" and vice-versa, as it only reflects the state of the task scheduler.

Ticking/unticking the option will create/delete the task.

I modified the task that FanControl's register cmd created (so it launches FanControl directly instead of using cmd.exe to start FanControl, and so it won't terminate after 3 days), and I moved the task into a Task Scheduler folder I created, also named FanControl.

 

Is it safe to assume this new option will be unaware of my modified/moved task?  In other words, the setting will show as Off, my modified/moved startup task won't be deleted and will continue to start FanControl, and I should leave the new setting Off so it won't create a redundant startup task?

[Rem0o]

1 minute ago, Adrenalina said:

I modified the task that FanControl's register cmd created (so it launches FanControl directly instead of using cmd.exe to start FanControl, and so it won't terminate after 3 days), and I moved the task into a Task Scheduler folder I created, also named FanControl.

 

Is it safe to assume this new option will be unaware of my modified/moved task?  In other words, the setting will show as Off, my modified/moved startup task won't be deleted and will continue to start FanControl, and I should leave the new setting Off so it won't create a redundant startup task?

If you named it differently and/or put it in a different folder, it will be unaware and you should leave it off.

[Nefcairon]

On 8/31/2019 at 9:01 PM, Rem0o said:

To run at startup: use the included cmd file

 

"Register_Startup_Task.cmd"

______________________________

You could remove that now from post 1.

[D.LT]

I just switched from a X370 Taichi to a X570 Tomahawk with the NCT6797 but every single time I start the app up it crashes and it doesn't matter where I put it

Unless there's a lib that i should have installed first that i'm not aware of?

 

Wait oh i think i got it figured out, rivatuner is trying to hook onto it

[Adrenalina]

18 hours ago, Nefcairon said:

You could remove that now from post 1.

Or insert the following: "For versions prior to Update 46, "

[Nefcairon]

On 5/18/2020 at 1:52 PM, Arouraios said:

Hey @Rem0o,

 

1. The option to hide some of the fan speed cards (I'm thinking a small button next to the rpm and an option in the hamburger menu to hide/show hidden speed cards)

 

This I miss the most currently. I have 2 fan headers connected with fans, but 6 empty speed cards which unneccessarely take up space. I really would look to see all information on one screen without scrolling.