SensorsView Pro is a software utility that monitors the temperature of your CPU, northbridge, motherboard, VGA and hard disks, as well as voltages and fan speeds.

No matter how calm and cool it may look on the outside, your PC could be hot on the inside. As you add more power - and more pieces of hardware - to your PC, the hotter it tends to run. And heat can cause serious damage to your computer's components.

Touching the case or listening for fans isn't the best way to judge the true temperature of your system; you need internal help from a utility such as SensorsView Pro.

This shareware utility monitors the temperature of some of your PC's key components, including your CPU, hard drive, northbridge, motherboard, and VGA, and can alert you when temperatures reach dangerous levels.

SensorsView Pro also is designed to monitor your system voltages and fan speeds (if this functionality is supported by your motherboard) and monitors your system's CPU and memory usage.

All of the results are displayed in easy-to-read graphs, and your CPU temperature also is shown in your system tray, so you can check it at a glance.

But we found that not all of SensorsView Pro's features worked for us. We installed the app on a Vista laptop, and it was able to monitor the temperature of the PC's hard drive, but not its CPU.

When we installed SensorsView Pro on a Vista desktop, it could measure both temperatures. On both of these computers, though, it was unable to monitor my voltage or fan speeds, saying it couldn't locate the necessary sensors. So you may want to take it for a test drive before purchasing a full licence.