Everything SPECTRA does, and how to use it.

Installing and the window Free

One signed installer puts three things on the PC: the SPECTRA app, the SPECTRA Sensor Service, and SPECTRA's kernel driver, which is signed by Microsoft's hardware program.

Download the installer from the home page and run it. It needs Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit) and takes under a minute. The service runs as the system account and reads what needs administrator rights (CPU temperature, the board's sensor chip, memory timings, S.M.A.R.T. on SATA drives), so the app itself never asks for elevation. The driver only reads: it has a fixed list of registers and ports it may touch, and no way to write to the hardware.

The window has the pages down the left, the page itself on the right, and the edition and Settings at the foot (see the Overview picture).

Finding your way

• System: Overview and Sensors.
• Components: Processor, Memory, Graphics, Storage, Motherboard and Network, each with its live readings and its part of the inventory.
• Data: History, Compare, Benchmarks, Reports, Fleet and Alerts.
• At the foot: your edition (click it to buy or upgrade), Full inventory, and the cog for Settings.

Closing the window keeps SPECTRA watching from the tray, where alerts still arrive; the tray icon's menu has Exit. Only one SPECTRA runs per Windows session: starting it again brings the running one forward. The theme follows Windows, light or dark, unless you pin one in Settings.

Editions, trial and keys

Every new installation runs every feature, Technician and Business included, for 14 days, then continues as SPECTRA Free. Two things need a bought key even then: issuing a health certificate (its public page carries your business name) and SPECTRA Portable. Nothing you saved is lost when an edition ends.

Activating a key

1. Buy from the pricing page. The key arrives by e-mail within minutes and looks like SPCT-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX.
2. In SPECTRA open Settings > About, paste the key and press Activate. From a command prompt: spectra licence activate SPCT-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX.
3. Activation needs the internet once; after that the licence is checked on the PC itself. Once a week SPECTRA asks our server whether the key is still valid: a renewal moves the end date by itself, a refunded key stops working.

To move a licence, open Settings > About on the old PC and press Remove licence; its seat is free again at once. Lost the key? Have it sent again to the address you bought it with.

Overview Free

The machine at a glance: what it is and how busy it is right now.

Gauges for the CPU and GPU temperatures and loads, then tiles for CPU load, memory in use, GPU load, network down and up, and disk activity, each with its latest value, a sparkline of the last minute, and its minimum, maximum and average. The line under the title names the PC, Windows, the processor, the memory and the uptime. Readings refresh every second (adjustable in Settings).

Sensors Free

Every live reading on the PC in one table: temperatures, loads, clocks, fan speeds, voltages, power and throughput.

The table is grouped the way the hardware is: CPU, GPU, memory, storage, motherboard, network. Each row shows the current value, the minimum, maximum and average since SPECTRA started, a small trend line, and its colour turns amber near an alert limit and red over it. The + at the end of a row creates an alert on that sensor.

Where the readings come from

• CPU: load in total and per core, per-core clocks, temperature (AMD Tctl through the driver; Intel package and per-core temperature), package power and, on AMD, every core's power.
• GPU: temperature, hotspot and memory temperature, load, memory controller, clocks, power, fan and VRAM in use, from the graphics driver's own library (NVIDIA NVML, AMD ADL, Intel IGCL).
• Motherboard Pro: the voltage rails, board temperatures and fan speeds from the board's sensor chip (Nuvoton, including the NCT668x on MSI boards, ITE and Fintek), named the way the board maker wires them. Free shows them in the inventory. Laptops have no board sensor chip: SPECTRA shows Windows' thermal zones instead, and the fan speeds on ASUS laptops.
• Memory: in use, available, and on DDR5 the temperature of each module Pro.
• Storage and network: drive temperatures and health, disk throughput, network down and up.

Processor, memory, graphics, network Free

One page per component: its live readings on top, its part of the inventory below.

• Processor: every core's load and clock, the clock trend, and the identity: code name, process node, socket, family, model, stepping and revision, cores and threads, caches, instruction sets, virtualisation.
• Memory: totals, slots and channels, each module's SPD (maker, part number, DRAM chips, the JEDEC timing table, XMP 2.0 / 3.0 and EXPO profiles) and, on AMD, the timings the memory controller is running now. The primary timings are free; the secondary and tertiary ones Pro.
• Graphics: each adapter with its true memory size, driver, VBIOS, PCIe link (and what it idles down to), architecture, performance levels, and each monitor from its EDID.
• Network: throughput, adapters with addresses, DNS and link speed, Wi-Fi, proxy, sharing and remote desktop state.

Storage and drive health Free

Each drive's real S.M.A.R.T. data, read without an administrator prompt, and how long it has left.

A card per drive: one health number (a blend of wear, spare capacity, temperature and attribute state), its temperature, wear, power-on hours, data written, reallocated and pending sectors, and the full attribute table for SATA drives. NVMe drives report their health log; members of AMD RAID arrays and of Intel RST volumes are read through the RAID driver where it allows.

Life left

SPECTRA notes each drive's wear once a day. After two readings at least two weeks apart it projects the trend: "About 3.6 years left - at that rate it reaches its rated life around May 2030." Until then it gives a first estimate per powered-on hour. A hard disk reports no wear, so instead SPECTRA warns when its reallocated sectors keep growing, which is how a failing disk shows itself.

Motherboard, fans and voltage rails Free

The board, its BIOS and slots, and everything its sensor chip measures.

Maker and model, chipset and southbridge, BIOS version and date, the expansion slots with their lane width and PCIe generation. Then the hardware monitor: every voltage rail (VCORE, +3.3, +5, +12 V and the rest), the board's temperatures and every fan header's speed, named with a table for the board when SPECTRA has one.

Fan control

For Nuvoton chips (most ASUS, MSI and ASRock boards) SPECTRA shows how each fan header is set: manual, Thermal Cruise or a Smart Fan curve, the temperature it follows, the curve's points and the critical temperature, and the duty it is running at now. This is what the BIOS programmed; SPECTRA reads it and changes nothing.

Full inventory, search and export Free

Everything SPECTRA knows about the PC, as one tree, searchable and exportable.

Operating system, CPU, RAM, motherboard, graphics, storage, optical drives, audio, peripherals, network, battery and an Extended section (environment variables, services, scheduled tasks, processes, connections; it can be switched off in Settings and never leaves the PC).

• Search: type a model, a driver version, a setting. Every word must match; matches are highlighted and the sections narrow to them.
• Export: JSON, plain text or a self-contained HTML report, saved where you choose. The JSON export is also what Compare works from.

History and charts Free Pro

Every sensor's past, kept on the PC through restarts, as charts you can zoom into.

The History page shows a card per sensor. Click one for its chart:

• Ranges: 5 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours, 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days.
• Zoom: drag across the chart to zoom into that span, or use the mouse wheel; the arrows step earlier and later; a double click goes back.
• Read it: hover for the time and value; the shaded band is each moment's lowest to highest, the line its average; the dashed red line is the sensor's alert limit; a gap means SPECTRA was not running or the PC was asleep.

The last hour is kept as read, every sample. Older history is kept as each minute's average, lowest and highest, for 30 days by default (Settings > General > Keep history for). Free shows the last five minutes; history beyond that, kept through restarts, is Pro.

Session replay Pro

Every sensor at a moment in the past, played back like a recording.

1. On the History page press Replay a past session.
2. Pick a day (or the last 24 hours) and drag the slider to a moment.
3. Press Play to move through time at 1 minute, 10 minutes or an hour per second.

Each tile shows the sensor's average for that minute and its range. Useful for "what was the PC doing when it froze at 3 o'clock".

CSV logging Pro

Every sensor, every few seconds, into a file any spreadsheet opens.

Turn it on in Settings > General > CSV logging. SPECTRA writes one file per day, spectra-YYYYMMDD.csv, in Documents\SPECTRA logs or a folder you choose: a row per moment, a column per sensor headed with its name and unit, local time with its offset. If a sensor appears during the day (a GPU waking up), the day continues in a -2 file so columns never shift. You can open today's file in Excel while it grows. Old files are deleted after the days you set (30 by default; 0 keeps all). The command line has the same: spectra monitor --csv log.csv.

Alerts Free Pro

Limits on readings, and a notification the moment one is crossed.

Nine rules come ready and are free: CPU, GPU, GPU hotspot and drive temperatures, VRAM, CPU load and memory use among them. Edit a limit with the pencil, remove one with the cross, or bring the built-in ones back with Restore defaults. Pro adds an alert on any sensor: the + beside it on the Sensors and History pages, or Add alert here.

When a limit is crossed, a Windows notification comes from the tray (clicking it opens this page) and the event is listed at the top. A quiet period (15 minutes by default) stops one sensor hovering at its limit from notifying again and again.

Alert delivery: e-mail, webhook, Discord, Telegram Pro

Alerts that reach you away from the PC.

In Settings > Alert delivery switch on any of:

• E-mail, through your mail server or provider (Gmail and Outlook.com work with port 587, TLS and an app password).
• Webhook: a JSON POST per alert with the machine, sensor, value, limit, unit and time, for Home Assistant, n8n, Zapier or your own script.
• Discord: the channel's webhook URL (channel settings > Integrations > Webhooks).
• Telegram: a bot token from @BotFather and your chat id.
• Syslog for a SIEM, see below.

Send a test alert tries every channel switched on with what is typed, before saving, and says what each answered. The quiet period applies to these channels too. Passwords and tokens are stored encrypted for your Windows account.

Tray reading and desktop overlay Pro

A temperature in the taskbar, and your chosen readings over games and full-screen work.

• Reading in the tray icon: the icon itself shows the number for the sensor you choose, amber near its alert limit and red over it, with the full reading in its tooltip. Windows may hide new tray icons: drag it onto the taskbar to keep it visible.
• Desktop overlay: the readings you tick, in a small panel in the corner you choose. It stays on top, never takes focus, lets clicks through by default, and its opacity is yours to set. It works over games in windowed or borderless mode.

Compare snapshots Free Pro

See exactly what changed: before and after a BIOS update, a new part, a repair, or between two PCs.

1. On the Compare page, give a name ("Before the BIOS update") and press Take snapshot. Taking and keeping snapshots is free.
2. Make the change.
3. Choose that snapshot as Before, Now as After, and press Compare Pro.

The result lists what was added, removed and changed, section by section, the old value struck through beside the new. Values that change by themselves (uptime, free space, running services and processes) are hidden and counted; one tick shows them. Save as HTML report writes a page to keep or print. Import a file brings in an export from another PC, so two machines can be compared. The command line does the same: spectra diff old.json new.json.

Benchmarks Pro

A minute to measure the CPU, the memory and the system drive, compared with the last run.

• CPU single-thread and multi-thread, in points (one core of a Ryzen 9 5950X is about 1000).
• Memory read, write and copy bandwidth in GB/s, and latency in nanoseconds.
• Disk sequential read and write (written through, unbuffered) in MB/s, and 4K random reads in IOPS.

Press Run the benchmark (or Quick run for about 20 seconds) and keep other programs quiet. Each result shows how it differs from the previous run on the same PC, which is how you see what a new cooler, a BIOS update or a memory profile changed. Past runs are listed below, each with a printable report. Command line: spectra bench.

Stress test Pro

Load the PC fully, check every result it computes, and say plainly whether it is stable.

Choose 5 to 120 minutes, the CPU (every thread), the memory, or both, and press Start the stress test. Every thread runs work whose answers are known in advance; the memory test writes patterns and reads them back. All the while every sensor is recorded. The verdict:

• FAIL: a wrong answer or a memory error. That is instability whatever the temperatures say: an overclock or undervolt too far, a memory profile the system cannot hold, too little voltage, or a failing part.
• WARNING: correct results, but the CPU reached its alert limit or 95 °C, or its clocks fell under the same load. Look at the cooling or the power limits.
• PASS: correct results, temperatures within limits, clocks steady.

The report gives the findings in words, a chart of the CPU temperature, and every sensor's lowest, average and highest value during the test; save it from the list of past runs. Command line: spectra stress --minutes 30 --memory 2048, which exits 0, 1 or 2 for PASS, WARNING or FAIL.

PC health certificate Technician

One page to hand over with a PC you checked, repaired or are selling, which anyone can verify online.

1. Open Reports. Optionally run a stress test and a benchmark first: the certificate includes the last month's.
2. Add a note if you like ("New thermal paste, Windows reinstalled") and press Preview to see what it will say.
3. Press Issue the certificate, then Save the printable certificate, and print it or save it as PDF.

The certificate grades the PC Good, Fair or Attention and says why (a drive predicting failure or below 70% health, a worn battery, a failed stress test). It lists the computer, processor, memory, graphics, Windows, each drive's health and hours, battery wear and cycles, and the tests. It carries no serial numbers, keys, user or network names.

Each certificate has a number and a QR code. Scanning it or opening the link shows our copy, marked Genuine, with the issuer's name, so a buyer knows the printout has not been edited. If a certificate no longer applies, withdraw it from the list on the Reports page and its page will say so.

Client report, with before and after Technician

The service report you give the customer, with your logo, the work you did and what changed.

1. When the PC comes in, take a snapshot on the Compare page ("When it came in").
2. On Reports, under Client report, enter your business name, contact lines and logo once and press Save your details.
3. Fill in the customer, the job number and the work carried out; choose the snapshot under Compare with; tick the full inventory appendix if wanted.
4. Press Save as PDF or Save as HTML.

The report has your header, the customer and job, the work in your words, a What changed section listing every part added, removed or changed since the snapshot, and the state of the PC now with its grade.

SPECTRA Portable Technician

SPECTRA on a USB stick, for the PCs you work on, leaving nothing behind.

Download SPECTRA Portable (zip, 68 MB)

Unzip SPECTRA Portable onto a stick and run SpectraApp.exe or spectra.exe from it. Everything it writes (settings, logs, history, snapshots, reports) stays in the Data folder on the stick; nothing goes into the PC's profile or registry, and it does not update itself or start with Windows. It runs as its own instance even on a PC with SPECTRA installed.

Activate your Technician key once on the stick: the seat belongs to the stick, so it goes with you from PC to PC. Without a Technician licence it runs as Free. The portable copy has no driver of its own, so it shows the user-mode readings (load, clocks, GPU, NVMe health); on a PC where SPECTRA is installed it reads that installation's driver too.

Battery health Free Technician

On laptops: how much of its original capacity the battery still holds.

The inventory's Battery section shows the battery's name, maker, chemistry, charge, whether it is charging, the charge or discharge rate and the voltage, free. Technician adds its health: design capacity against full-charge capacity, the wear between them as a percentage, the charge cycle count, and a condition in plain words, from "Good - like new" to "Poor - replace". The battery's wear also appears on the health certificate.

Remote access, Prometheus and the REST API Business

Let monitoring on another machine read this PC: Prometheus and Grafana, scripts, help-desk tools.

1. Open Settings > Remote access and switch on Let other computers read this PC's sensors.
2. Keep port 9182 and HTTPS unless you have a reason not to. Optionally limit who may connect with Allow only from (addresses or networks like 192.168.1.0/24).
3. Copy the access token, or copy the ready-made Prometheus scrape job into prometheus.yml. Save.

The API is read-only: nothing can be changed through it. Every request needs the token (Authorization: Bearer ...). HTTPS uses a certificate SPECTRA makes for the PC; its fingerprint is shown so a monitoring server can pin it. Windows asks once whether SPECTRA may accept connections.

On a server without a desktop session: spectra serve --remote --token-file token.txt.

Fleet console Business

Every PC in one place: online or not, what is over its limits, and what hardware changed.

1. On each PC switch on remote access and note its address and token.
2. On the PC that will be the console, open Fleet, enter the address (e.g. 192.168.1.20:9182), the token and a name, and press Add to the fleet.

The console reads every machine each minute and its full inventory every six hours. The table shows each machine's status, its hottest reading, how many readings are over their limits, its hardware changes in the last week, and when it was last seen. Click a machine for its details, all its readings, and its change log: every part added, removed or changed between two inventories, with the date (a memory module pulled, a drive swapped, a BIOS flashed). Each machine's certificate is pinned on first contact, so a different machine at the same address is refused until you trust it.

Asset register and audits

Export every machine and its hardware as an Excel workbook (.xlsx) or CSV, and the changes as CSV. A scheduled audit (daily or weekly) writes both into a folder by itself. Nothing goes through our servers: the console talks to your machines directly.

Fleet policies Business

Set the alert rules and monitoring settings once, on the console, for every machine.

On the console's Fleet page, under Fleet policy, tick what to publish (this PC's alert rules, the sampling interval, how long history is kept, CSV logging) and press Publish. The console's own remote access must be on. On each machine, in Settings > Remote access > Fleet policy, enter the console's address and token. Machines check every 15 minutes and apply a new version as soon as they see one. On servers: spectra serve --policy https://console:9182 --policy-token-file token.txt.

Syslog and SIEM Business

Alerts and fleet events into Splunk, Elastic, Sentinel, Graylog or rsyslog.

In Settings > Alert delivery > Syslog give the server, the port (514) and UDP or TCP. Each alert is sent as an RFC 5424 message with the reading as structured data (machine, sensor, value, limit, unit). On a fleet console, every hardware change on a machine is sent as its own event (item, before, after), and so is a machine going silent or coming back. The same events go to the webhook, e-mail, Discord and Telegram if those are on.

Settings

The cog at the foot of the window. Save applies; Cancel or Esc discards.

Command line

The installer puts spectra on the PATH; spectra --help lists everything.

Updates, privacy and support Free

SPECTRA keeps itself up to date: the service checks every six hours, downloads a new version, verifies its checksum and signature, and installs it while nobody is using the PC: after ten minutes without input, when the PC is locked, or at the next start. To install it at once, use Install SPECTRA x.y.z now in the tray menu or Check now in Settings > About: it installs in the background, with no installer window and no permission prompt, and SPECTRA reopens on the new version by itself. Updates are free in every edition.

The inventory, history, snapshots and reports stay on the PC. The update check sends the version and a short census without anything that names you; anonymous hardware data is opt-in and previewable. The privacy notice lists every field.

For help, use Settings > Support > Contact support: your message goes with SPECTRA's log and a description of the PC (all listed before you send), and the answer appears in the same place.