Conky as System Monitor

2010, March 4 - 5:58pm — vyvy

Last Updated (07-Mar-09): Added the monitoring of CPU fan speed.

I have recently discovered Conky, a very nice light-weight system monitor. A screenshot along with the current configuration file are attached below.

Now a bit of history. When I first shared my configuration file on 04-Mar-09, Xman [myxman.org] was sharp enough to notice that the temperature of my processor was way too high -- 62°C as shown in the old screenshot below. What? I just upgraded my computer about five months ago and I suffered from heat problem now? I doubted it but I still unplugged my processor's fan, cleaned the dusts, put it back, and measured the temperature again. Ha! It dropped to around 50°C even after occupying both cores with Astropulse [setiathome.berkeley.edu] for at least 5 hours. Does this suggest that we should clean our processor's fan 2-3 times every year? I realized that it's important to measure the fan speed too so I added it into the configuration file. The fan speed is around 3,200 rpm now. Unfortunately I forgot to check the fan speed before the cleaning. Let's wait for a few months and see what will happen.