It asks, but not any reports about problem with stress drives are known.

He didn’t say anything on how often it asks.

#10 wrote: http://www.hddlife.com/HDDlife.exe is a Free download. Full Freeware. Same version number. 6.5 MB.
Yes, but if you look at the comparison chart, the free version is so crippled it can hardly even do anything. Most all of the features are gone or disabled in the free version of this program.

#15 WROTE: “This application is crap.
- I purchased and installed a new HDD from Seagate. Application showed 49% HDD life.
- I purchased a new second one from Seagate, 65% life
- then a new retail Maxtor, 68%
- Western Digital drives are correctly detected, I got 98% after 2 months of hdd use.

Well, that’s pretty harsh, but you’ve got a point. I also found the %-age indicator meaningless. Not accurately portraying anything.
And also this program incorrectly identified the installed physical drives. Plus even though I disabled the default annoying warning SOUND, it STILL kept beeping and buzzing on me despite sound being disabled. So I had to quit out of the program after it kept Bleeping about one drive with low disk space every 10 minutes.

#16 WROTE: I’m guessing you need S.M.A.R.T. enabled on your mobo for this app to work? why not just heed your POST screens?
Yes, it uses SMART. And also this program said it could not provide temp status on one of my drives because temp was not supported.
SMART is on the drive itself, not (only) the mobo. But a reason to use this (not this program but *a* monitoring program) is because
POST only happens at boot up. Personally I have machines that stay up for 29 days… 10 days… 2 months… 15 days… etc. So you would
only get notified on Bootup and if you don’t reboot for days or even weeks or months, then you might miss an event that might indicate
a drive is beginning to show signs of failure. So this type of program could provide continuous monitoring, and that would be one reason to run this instead of just relying on POST warnings.

#18 wrote: “How is this software supposed to be helpful? I installed it and it gives me the temperature which is nice as my laptop tends to heat up but I don’t understand what exactly it is supposed to be doing.” – It’s a program to improve your life by stimulating your brain and increasing your mental power by challenging your mind to figure out all that it does. That’s why it is called “HDDLife” :) Oh, and also, it tells the temperature of your drives.

#31 wrote: “Hey number #15,….Get a life.” -an HDD Life?

#36 WROTE: “I did a find for the MSI and it is not found.”
-UGH. MSI’s are the worst installers. .msi files are horrible. msi stands for Micro Soft Installer. They are slow. They are cumbersome. They put all kinds of crap and junk littering your registry. .msi files cannot be deleted because the uninstaller needs pieces of stuff that are in the original .msi file to uninstall a program and if you delete it then the uninstaller breaks. MSI files dump themselves into hidden places in your “application data” directory in your local settings folder, and msi files also put themselves or pieces of themselves into your C:\WINDOWS directory. msi files are a MESS. If any developers are reading this… 2 words for you: DO NOT EVER USE THE MSI INSTALLER! Ok, if you were paying attention, that’s not 2 words, but you can probably think of 2 nice words that can be used to describe .msi files. ;-) –by the way, you made a very informative and useful post Ron/Rohn. Full of Good suggestions for the developers.

#53 WROTE The Advanced Specialist… Thanks for those comments. –You’re welcome :-) And btw you were right. Your name showed as anonymous.

#65 Steve WROTE: “but what language is #27? anyone?” –Steve, that is ROMANIAN language. That’s a fake post designed as a link-back to THEIR own site to fudge its popularity in search engines. Romania is the home of some of the most obnoxious spammers, annoying chat flooders, identity thieves, credit card fraud perpetrators, etc. Some organizations have blocked the IP NETBLOCKS of the entire country. Romania is known as harboring unscrupulous users and being rife with cybercrime. Here, you can just go read about it CBS NEWS for example: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/20/tech/main578965.shtml Even the Travel Advisories by the DEPARTMENT of STATE talk about creditcard fraud in ROMANIA. And the cybercrime problem and Romania is pretty well known See: http://www.crime-research.org/news/28.02.2005/994/ Don’t ever buy/sell anything on ebay to or from Romania, or open emails or software from the .RO domain. And DONT CLICK on the SPAMMERS url. Don’t feed the cockroaches. :)

1. To activate the program, Read the README file and do what it says in there.

2. Aside from the README, there is often a program called “ACTIVATE.EXE” included in the download. RUN IT to activate the program.

3. When you run the activate program, Make sure you have internet access turned on and you have access so that it can ‘talk’ to the giveawayoftheday.com website. I believe it might need to phone home to confirm your activation. Make sure your firewall etc is not blocking anything.

4. If you still think it’s not registered, not activated, or it still says TRIAL VERSION, or if it still says “nn days remaining”, then QUIT out of the application program and open it again. If it’s the type of program that minimizes to an icon near your clock (that area is called “the system tray”) then you need to click that icon and exit that too. Sometimes just clicking the [X] box on the application window doesn’t quit, it is just minimizing it. Make sure you QUIT out of it completely. Then open the program again.

5. If all else fails, REBOOT your computer and then check if it is Activated.

:-)

Try doing those before posting and see how it goes 1st. You’d be surprised how many problems a nice reboot will solve. :) Try it.