- This is pretty useless if the current user doesn't have admin rights. Assuming the current account has full admin rights is a hallmark, imho, of poorly written software. Perfmon gets metrics just fine without admin, as does Process Explorer and a number of other applications. At the very least this should get the metrics and pop an auth dialog if it needs to update the Registry or something that actually requires elevated priviledge.
- It also doesn't remember its registration key across accounts, so each and every account on the machine has to re-re-re-registers. Bad Form! (tm)
- It also appears to be unstable. It's crashed numerous times both as a regular user and as admin. Seems like it works for a while, then BOOM. Half the time I have to use Process Explorer to kill it, it's so badly messed up.
- All in all, even for free, this isn't worth the effort consumed to install it. Excellent idea ... inferior implementation.

I haven't been mailed the registration password so right now it is worthless to me.

I installed the program and it worked for aboyt 15-20 minutes but each time, it became non-responsibe after that time and I could not restart the program until I rebooted.

Reinstallation did not fix the problem so out it goes.

installed on a few PC & de-installed the next day.
PRG is not mature... keeps freezing up ... wants upon startup to go into the internet & only works after 2nd or 3rd try without the internet.
... does a nice job when optimizing fragmented files, but on the whole adds to problems. I prefer HD Tune, Defraggle, CCleaner, pagedfrg... small dedicated PRGs that do their job clean & troublefree. I'd never dare to erase all the files HDD Observer recommends to erase in their Registry cleaning. It just asks for trouble.

I am very happy with this tool and it's ability to pull all the utilities together into one place. Would like to know how I can improve my hd overall health from 62% - I completed all of the tests....

This looked promising, so I installed it. It worked well checking the HD stats, but had problems when I tried to use other tools (Defrag). It froze and required me to kill it. That totally scared the heck out of me since I have had trouble when killing a defrag in the past (I had to reinstall XP!). Upon reboot, the program booted up and showed that the hard drive was working at 105% of performance and the icon was spinning uncontrollably. I had to kill it again just to deinstall it from my system with Revo.

If Daoisoft can get it to stop freezing it might be a decent program. I also had problems with XTweak, which I also uninstalled.

Keep trying, hopefully a future version will be better.

It's quite good tool to mess up and clutter personal computer. The more software you have, the more speed your computer lose, and disk get slower and slower. Which actually mean more Job for computer pro's and of course more job for disk manufacturers.

I love Giveaway of the Day but this program totally messed up my system. It has no restore or undo. If you remove something from the registry you can't get it back!

VERY NICE PRESENTATION AND EASY TO USE!!!!!!!!!
THANKS
LVM

In comment #73 I wrote that the program always freezes when started. Suddenly and for no obvious reason the problem is gone and the program works fine. :)

@102, your comments re UNINI piqued my curiosity so I searched for more information about it, but couldn't find anything! If what you say is true, surely you'll be able to provide some links to pages where I can read more about it! thanks!

Sooo I tried about 3hrs to get it installed. NgenOptimizer has encountered a problem and needs to close. I could never open the program because of this. Anyone know what NgenOptimizer does? I am going to call it a night. When I awake maybe I have another chance for a different program. I sure wanted HDD Observer.

I totally agree with Hawk and # 32... I am disabled and cannot type many days . That would be fantastic as on diability its hard to
afford those progs. Thanks for everything GOTD !







excuse typos - as I said, hard to type for me.. thanks

Incredible software with a really cool interface. I almost missed this one, and I'm so glad I didn't. The Disk Cleaner and Registry Cleaner do require a bit of knowledge and caution, but are very good tools. This will replace my Hard Drive Inspector (another great giveaway, but this one is better).

Great program offered today! Installed flawlessly on an 8 year old laptop (Compaq Armada M700 running Windows XP SP2), and ran great. A rather interesting fact, I found that my HD was only 57% healthy, but ran with 91% performance. Sadly, my only complaint is it's lack of ability to increase the health and/or performance on the HD. Regardless, it serves as a great HD monitoring tool and doesn't hog your system resources! Great giveaway GOTD!

Remember to save the keys on your programs by going to the about section, or searching the registry. That way, most of them can be recovered if you need to clean your pc of viruses or something like that. Also remember: Some of those keys will work for upgrades on thier respective programs. For instance, Registry Easy (v2.3 at time of giveaway I think) can upgrade to version 4.6 using the same key!!!!!! Please give + if you found this helpful :)

It's not that I have nothing better to do,,,but I enjoy reading all the comments in here. It's sometimes better than reading the Sunday Comics. A bit of sage advice before getting or trying any software free or otherwise. Read about it first so you know what it is, than read about it again so you know something about how it works. Then read the help section so you know how it runs. Also try to find if it has a manual and either print it out or save as a PDF, then you will be able to READ how to use it. Just my 2 cents that would alleviate a lot of software issues

Won't let me register..tried CCP and putting the registration code manually 4 times..still would not register..now I have the fun of seeing if it will un-install all the things it installed..thanks for putting more spit on my computer GAOTD...

To #1 Son Of Ken Kelly
That was brilliant. Great parody. Every time I look at it I start laughing.
I can see Ed Norton (the actor) playing Ken Kelly. Tim Conway, from the old Carol Burnett Show would probably be the perfect Ken Kelly.

I downloaded this software from Giveaway of the Day on Aug. 1st, and it freezes my machine. I run WindowsXP Home w/ Service Pack 2,
CPU Type Mobile AMD Sempron LV, 1800 MHz (9 x 200) 3100+
1028gb memory.

Seems like a great utility, but it won't run for me. Thank You anyway.

This program is good for getting an easily readable SMART monitor for your drive. However I would not leave it running all the time just run it from time to time to keep an eye on the drives health. For this it is better than any free program I have found for this.

Again, The same whine.....
From #6 "I mean comon, 35 thumbs up and down in less then 15 minutes."
I only come here to get a good laugh from the comments, the software given away here is nothing but crap.

I still cannot get the program to stop saying the registration key is invalid! I've tried many times now to get the program to accept it, the key was typed in correctly too, on both my xp and vista machines!

second computer:

Error - HDD Observer 2.6.9 You don’t have enough rights on this system. The drive letters cannot be read


BOTH XP

This is difficult to characterize. It’s a .NET 2.0 app, and at least on Vista, installs some DTweak components (and DevExpress components, etc.) It wants a lot of Internet access, partly to check for news and updates (default is one-hour intervals, which is ridiculous). A recent update to my security software broke some of its log viewers, and manually reading the logs was a pain, but I didn’t notice anything terrible (I’ll be able to tell a lot more when the log viewers are working again). I received a warning from my security software that it was trying to modify SVCHost’s memory, which I blocked (I’m never sure whether those warnings are accurate).

I find this to be a curious mix of tools. It monitors SMART data, but not as well as one of the previous giveaways (I don’t remember the name right off, it’s on my dead XP box). The default HDD Observer icon tooltip displays single values; I assume they’re the worst across all SMART-enabled drives. The program itself can display information on a per-drive basis, and you can have additional icons displayed per drive (and for temperature, using any conceivable temperature scale).

It also monitors fragmentation, free space, junk files, etc. You have options for what things are checked, how frequently, what warnings are given, etc. It has a link to a lot of Windows disk tools. It also has links to its own tools. There’s no Help. I didn’t risk any of its tools. I already have a decent disk defragmenter which monitors things (Raxco PerfectDisk 2008 build 61; another 25% discount expired yesterday). I’m not aware of any safe way to internally defragment the Windows Registry while Windows is running (that’s different from defragmenting the physical registry files).

CPU load is lower than AnVir (AnVir is a bit heavy), but virtual memory size is quite large on my system (254 MB). The working set varies a lot, but is generally OK, around 10 MB. Private bytes are a bit heavy at around 60 MB. (The resource usage on your computer may be different.)

Personally, I doubt I’ll ever use this. There are better SMART monitors, AnVir provides far more information, and serious defragmenters are much better. Also, there are lots of other monitoring tools (Vista monitors and logs everything, anyway, and has a Reliability and Performance monitor).

#10, shegeek72, Google uses vast quantities of drives, and their analysis indicated that drives which run hot do fine, it’s drives which run cooler than normal that are more prone to failure. Their analysis also indicated that SMART diagnostics aren’t particularly useful. The trends matter much less than any single serious error, which indicates a high probability of near-term drive failure. However, if the drive lasts a while without any more errors, then it will probably have a normal lifespan. Most drives fail without any warning.

The vendors use the word “repair” in their promotional blurb but I see no actual repair function. Everything it says it repairs are not hard drive failures but normal operations that degrade the access speed to the properly stored information. The only time a “repair” is necesary is when data is becoming marginal when read relying strongly on retries and ECC error correction or if the sector has actually failed then a forced re-map of the sector and any retrievable data at the drives firmware level would be a legitimate repair. The only thing this does is optimise a normally working drive. Which is debatable if the optimisations provided outweigh the real-time effects of having the program running all the time!

HDD Observer looks promising and useful for some things, if there’s a way to get it to do something except freeze up instead of allowing registering.

I also do wish that DUTweak had been available for Vista users to register it and have full use of it, when XTweak was offered, since XTweak didn’t work on my vista machine and the free version of DUTweak is such crippleware that it was useless as well.

As for people who aren’t native English speakers, the fact is that the world is full of ppl whose native language is something else, and I’ve found it surprising how many know at least a little English, compared to how many English speakers there are, who don’t know any other language but English. Having both worked at learning other languages, and helping people whose native languages is not English, I’ve come to appreciate the difficulty and confusion that all the quirks, exceptions to rules, words spelled the same with different meanings, or words that sound the same but are spelled and used totally differently, or a word whose meaning can be different depending on the sentence and way its used, can present to people who are trying to master English. I try to offer help and understanding, nstead of just criticizing non-English native speakers when I see their mistakes.

If anyone wants to just criticize non-English speakers abilities in English, all you need to do is look at some of the plentiful mistakes that are made all the time by native English writers and speakers when they use common words such as “there” instead of “their”, or the wrong form of the words two, to, too, etc, (often because of too much reliance on spell checkers which cannot distinguish which form of such words is correct!) I’ve seen many worse mistakes made by English native speakers, in classified ads! Pick up any newspaper and look at pet ads and see how many shepards, sheperds you see instead of the correct word “shepherd”. Or see how many spaded animals are advertised, instead of “spayed.” The point is, when mistakes abound in print, that have been made by people who are in careers where writing is one of the ways their quality of work is judged, (including mistakes made by educational institutions in their printed material!), I don’t think that its fair to just criticize non-English natives errors in what they write, instead of helpfully pointing out the error, offering the correct alternative, and showing some empathy.

If you have Microsoft OneCare running, it seems that these processes that are performed by this product are redundant. However this products seems to have a nice overall graphical layout of processes / hardware status. I give it a thumbs up, Nice work done by the developer.
Below are more details describing how Windows Live OneCare diagnoses and corrects common problems, maintains PC settings, and optimizes computer and browser speed:
——
Defrags Hard Drives
Defrags Registry
Restores ability to print
Clears stuck job in printer queue
Restores broken printer spooling
Fixes connectivity problems with applications like MSN messenger
Restores ability to view emerging document formats (XPS,WPF) in Internet Explorer (IE)
Fixes installation failures caused by incorrect WoW64 key settings
Fixes failures for third party printer drivers
Fixes incorrect User Account Control settings
Maintains optimal security settings
Maintains IE security and privacy settings at recommended levels
Maintains Office macro security settings at recommended levels
Ensures IE pop-up blocker is on
Prevents browser piracy by redirection through the host file
Shuts down service for remote Windows registry editing
Optimizes PC performance and browser speed
Automates IE cache settings to improve browser speed
Removes broken or corrupt items from startup
Enables virtual memory settings to improve PC speed Cleans up unnecessary temporary files
Improves reliability with System Restore
Scans, Cleans, Quarantines or blocks viruses and/or adware programs
Alerts Galore, letting you see programs that are going to change the settings of your computer.
My suggestion is, if you’re worried about performance and tweaks at a serious level, check out these professional programs… http://www.lavalys.com/index.php?lang=en
There is a free version of this product that I am sure any of you will appreciate… It even shows the Over Clock variables for your computer. EVEREST Home Edition 2.20 - http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4181.html

bloatware is bad enough, but bloatware that freezes the system on every bootup is INEXCUSABLE! Had to do a safe boot in order to uninstall and even then the system ran like molasses so I had to do a system restore to (hopefully) remove the remaining leftovers from this piece of crap software. F-

NgenOptimizer has encountered a problem and needs to close.

I installed in on 2 different PCs and it ran OK the first time, but any subsequent execution locked up both PCs for an indeterminate amount of time before I was forced to reboot. Both PCs were running Windows XP, but had very different hardware. I am VERY disappointed with this program, I've seen and used much better....

This is Total CrapWare. It locks up on every machine I install it on, and in some cases, locks up the machine itself. Never gonna do that again. BLECH

I've installed it on two systems and I like what I see so far. I changed the option for checking updates to 168 hours, from 1, and bumped up the maximum junk file size before an alert would be issued. Other than that the defaults seem pretty good.

I ran the cleanup and was impressed with the results. I only kept one file of those it wanted to delete.

I have no temperatures coming up on the desktop, but it may not have sensors for that. The temperatures seem okay on the laptop, although I plan to doublecheck with a different program after seeing some earlier comments.

All in all, this seems excellent. Thanks.

Downloaded this last night,tried registry cleaner seemed to work ok, did it again this morning and all the same deleted entries i had yesterday were back.Turned computer of and did it again and again all back.Uninstalled don't like it.

I tried to install several times & it will not work on my laptop. I tried to un install a few times & it leaves allot of things behind.
This is the first program I got that didn't work for me. So to me this is useless. I never complain usually. Sorry but to me this is not a good down load.
Wolf.

ANSWER TO Nr. 28, about his comments about Nr.1

Written in UNINL (United Nations, International Neutral Language)-
Used by millions of educated people and diplomats.

Nombro 28, kial vi enigmis al kun Nr.1? (Enigmis al de la rimarkoj de #1 kvankam - vi parol La Angla ?) kompreneble Nr.1 parolas La Anglan! La demandon ĉi tie estas se ĝi estas vi se parol La Angla ĉu, aŭ ĉu ne,Nr. 1 diris: " Hodiaŭ aferojn ŝajn esti vi eble bezonos ĝin ĉu, aŭ ĉu ne,. Unua afero estas, vi kiel ĝi aŭ not.When vi ŝat ĝi kaj ne bezonas ĝin, decidiĝ por deŝuto. Se vi deŝuto Mi ne sci vin bezon ĝin aŭ kiel ĝi aŭ. Do pli bona estos kiel ĝi kaj esti senhava por ĝi kaj poste download. Kiam vi bezon ĝi kaj ne ŝat ĝi, vi nepre ...u ne deŝuto. bilanco estas, estas prudente rigard unua. Do rigard ĉi tiu ejo, dum vi estas ĉi tie en ĝu far saĝa elekto. ĉion dirite vi povus esti bezon ĝi kaj perhapse kiel ĝi tro (Mi ne )". All scias pri kiu estas perfekte komprenebla.

Well this makes me kind of sad. I just put together my new PC 2 weeks ago and it says my brand new hard drive is only 75% healthy.

@#1 son of ken kelly... ROFLMAO!! I get it!! to bad ken kelly doesn't.

I really wanted this program, but despite having tried several downlods (from different sources) I repeatedly get the message: NgenOptimizer has encountered a problem and needs to close. When I look up (Google it) NgenOptimizer I find that there is no info. to be found, so I don't know if it's something on my PC which stops the download from working, or what it is. If someone out there knows what this is, please write back to let me, and perhaps other people with the same problem know what to do about this.

Kind regards

Downloaded program. Program would not accept reg key that was attempted to be entered 3 different ways: cut & paste-nixed, typed-nixed, Ctl-c & Ctl-v nixed. Next it was uninstalled. Won't work=no keep.

Installed fine, but will not run on Win Xp Svc Pak 2

Error:
- HDD Observer 2.6.9 You don’t have enough rights on this system. The drive letters cannot be read

I am the only user and have Adm Rights on this computer.

Waste of my time.

Thank you #1, I needed a good laugh.

On closing the program and reopening it, I found that the registration input window will now come up. But it doesn't let you paste in the registration code, you have to type it and no matter how many times I typed it in correctly, it still said the code was incorrect! I even pasted what I typed under the code in the "readme" to make sure it was identical, and it was identical and correct...but I still get invalid registration code messages on both the Vista and xp machines!

I have the same problem as #55. Same error message. Downloaded fine on my other computer. this one has xp home edition. the other had pro. Too bad because I probably won't be up long enough for someone to tell me what to do about it.

I always try to judge any new software in a risk vs. reward category. Unfortunately, being familiar with this vendor say says I need to see. Regardless of the pros, I don't trust them so I'm passing. I already have 3 such apps anyway & not a one have the built in temptations of this one!
Speed Fan is free, Everest Ultimate & HDDLife Pro fills the need of drive monitoring completely. This ones added featured are nothing more then "use at your own risk", so keep it!

Looks OK at first glance but why is it eating 20% of my precious CPU cycles doing nothing?
Please verify yourself: measure your CPU usage when HDD is active, disable monitoring (right click the system icon) and measure again.

I don't mind feeding hungry applications but I surely want some compensation.

#88 even though the program was frozen because it wouldn't register when I clicked yes on the prompt in the window saying trial expired, do you want to register now (What trial? This was first time I'd downloaded the prog)
it still showed me the msg warning that my external HDD was almost totally filled up and critically low on space!

What I wish it could do (after wishing it would let me register it and quit freezing, so I can actually USE it), is be able to run off of a USB stick, so that it could be used to check HDDs that have problems that prevent the machines they are in from being booted, or HDDs that spin but that cannot be detected by the pc, etc.

HDD Observer looks promising and useful for some things, if there's a way to get it to do something except freeze up instead of allowing registering.

I also do wish that DUTweak had been available for Vista users to register it and have full use of it, when XTweak was offered, since XTweak didn't work on my vista machine and the free version of DUTweak is such crippleware that it was useless as well.

As for people who aren't native English speakers, the fact is that the world is full of ppl whose native language is something else, and I've found it surprising how many know at least a little English, compared to how many English speakers there are, who don't know any other language but English. Having both worked at learning other languages, and helping people whose native languages is not English, I've come to appreciate the difficulty and confusion that all the quirks, exceptions to rules, words spelled the same with different meanings, or words that sound the same but are spelled and used totally differently, or a word whose meaning can be different depending on the sentence and way its used, can present to people who are trying to master English. I try to offer help and understanding, nstead of just criticizing non-English native speakers when I see their mistakes.

If anyone wants to just criticize non-English speakers abilities in English, all you need to do is look at some of the plentiful mistakes that are made all the time by native English writers and speakers when they use common words such as "there" instead of "their", or the wrong form of the words two, to, too, etc, (often because of too much reliance on spell checkers which cannot distinguish which form of such words is correct!) I've seen many worse mistakes made by English native speakers, in classified ads! Pick up any newspaper and look at pet ads and see how many shepards, sheperds you see instead of the correct word "shepherd". Or see how many spaded animals are advertised, instead of "spayed." The point is, when mistakes abound in print, that have been made by people who are in careers where writing is one of the ways their quality of work is judged, (including mistakes made by educational institutions in their printed material!), I don't think that its fair to just criticize non-English natives errors in what they write, instead of helpfully pointing out the error, offering the correct alternative, and showing some empathy.

#21 I am also running into that same problem with the "trial time elapsed" message and the program freeze. I had to use task manager to kill the program because it was totally non-responsive. It is doing the ssme non-responsive thing too, on the vista machine. I had to close it on the vista machine too!

I also want to note re#70, that most pcs I've seen that come with OEM preinstalled software, also have the original SW on a recovery partition on the hard disk (and I recently ran into a situation where the recovery DVD, when used in trying to install a new hd on a machine where the HD had died completely) opened up the Norton Ghost interface and prompts the user to insert floppy...BUT THE MACHINE IS ONE OF THOSE THAT DOES NOT AND NEVER HAS HAD A FLOPPY DRIVE!)

My point however, is that if this program has problems with machines with recovery partitions, it will have problems with almost every machine that the typical consumer would buy (machines with OEM software preinstalled and ready to go.)

One of my older OEM pcs, a Compaq Presario that still has its original HD, bought back in late 2003 or early 2004, came with a recovery partition in it, so OEM machines using recovery partitions have been around quite a long time now. My newest machine, the Vista laptop (Toshiba Satellite), bought at the very end of December 07, also has a recovery partition. This should help show that machines with recovery partitions have been in use for quite a long time and by different manufacturers, and that it would be worth the while of the developers of HDD Observer, to modify the program to work with them.

#69, I agree that REVO uninstaller is the best freeware uninstaller I've seen, comparable even to the Cleanse uninstaller that was given away on GAOTD awhile back.

Now, is there a way to get HDD Observer to respond and register instead of freezing? I did notice even though it froze, it still gave some useful info, HDD temperatures and a space warning that my external HD was almost crammed full of stuff!

I love this program, but wish it would check my external hard drive.

As for the link posted By #49. This does not work with SATA drives

Just curious Guys,
If you have Microsoft OneCare running, it seems that these processes that are performed by this product are redundant. However this products seems to have a nice overall graphical layout of processes / hardware status. I give it a thumbs up, Nice work done by the developer.
Below are more details describing how Windows Live OneCare diagnoses and corrects common problems, maintains PC settings, and optimizes computer and browser speed:
------
Defrags Hard Drives
Defrags Registry
Restores ability to print
Clears stuck job in printer queue
Restores broken printer spooling
Fixes connectivity problems with applications like MSN messenger
Restores ability to view emerging document formats (XPS,WPF) in Internet Explorer (IE)
Fixes installation failures caused by incorrect WoW64 key settings
Fixes failures for third party printer drivers
Fixes incorrect User Account Control settings
Maintains optimal security settings
Maintains IE security and privacy settings at recommended levels
Maintains Office macro security settings at recommended levels
Ensures IE pop-up blocker is on
Prevents browser piracy by redirection through the host file
Shuts down service for remote Windows registry editing
Optimizes PC performance and browser speed
Automates IE cache settings to improve browser speed
Removes broken or corrupt items from startup
Enables virtual memory settings to improve PC speed Cleans up unnecessary temporary files
Improves reliability with System Restore
Scans, Cleans, Quarantines or blocks viruses and/or adware programs
Alerts Galore, letting you see programs that are going to change the settings of your computer.
My suggestion is, if you’re worried about performance and tweaks at a serious level, check out these professional programs... http://www.lavalys.com/index.php?lang=en
There is a free version of this product that I am sure any of you will appreciate... It even shows the Over Clock variables for your computer. EVEREST Home Edition 2.20 - http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4181.html
-Flash

Excellent program and the Defragmentation seems to work (much better then Windows demanding at least 10% free HD to run).

Sorry but I just don't trust anything from this publisher & thats putting it mildly.
I own DTweak that was, as far as I'm concerned a rip off. It destroyed a Vista Home Premium system on me. That was before I changed to Vista Ultimate so it's water under the bridge at this point. Score 1 for Daoisoft, 0 for ww2.
That was the first and only time I'll pay for or use anything by them again, ever!
Like a fool, I installed this garbage & the first time I restarted my computer, Windows blocked it from starting with the PC. Luckily, that was on Vista Ultimate so I killed it with Revo & did a system restore to a point prior to my 2nd mistake with Daoisoft. That will be the last one, I swear it!
Surely, as much as I don't need another media converter, I'd rather see them for a month strait then anything from this poor at best, company ever again.
Final, forever score, Daoisoft 1, ww2 1.