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Brinny05

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Monitoring PC Usage

Hi,
   Does anyone out there know of any utiilites that can monitor a processors or harddisks usage since it began ?
i.e; can it tell us how many times a HDD has been written to or what life is left on a processor ?
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Gary Case
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Mnf

>>  what life is left   <<  the same as for animals, or humans : can be their life span (which is unknown) but can be shortened drasically by a disease, or accident -> unpredictable too.
>>  how many times a HDD has been written to   <<  i suppose that you can make a program that counts it in bits, bytes and files, but as said above : why would you like to know that? and up to now, i do not know one that does just that - - maybe an open market niche here ?
Most devices, especially mechanical, follow a "bathtub curve" for their failure rates - ie initially very high, declining at a steady rate to a certain floor, then rising again at the end of their life.  

Curve info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

But, for any ONE device, you cannot use this to calculate where it is on the curve, as this is only true for a general population.  Consequently, info on No of Disk Writes, or Processor Cycles Calculated is not too useful in terms of predicting life, unless you are studying many identical devices.  

Other useful stats for any device are Mean Time Before Failure - but again, this is only a Mean, or average, so all you can do is give some statistical indication of whether failure at the current time is likely or not.  

Why do you want to know?