What exactly does "Temperature" measure?

I found a few topics on the Health Tab but information seems to be little to none. Thought I'd ask my question anyway in hopes someone has something new.

What exactly does "Temperature" monitor? The processor? My processor is a Pentium 4 2.80GHz. Defraggler is showing a temp of 31C / 87F and is RED, which I assume is a warning but Health says "Good" and is GREEN. That temperature is perfectly normal for the processor so I'm wondering what gives. Is it measuring something else?

I've got the same version of Defraggler installed on two other machines, and on one the temp is GREEN and the other is BLACK.

Senses HDD temp. Run Speccy, the two will agree.

Very much appreciated kroozer. I didn't even know hard drives could get too hot. I think mine must be getting into the upper range, thus the red color, but I don't think it's overheating. Good info. :)

My Win7 is 33º/green, Vista is 36º/green. Your spec for heat tolerance is much lower, but I would guess 31º is not too high for an HDD.

Edit: Later I checked the Vista and it was 44º and still green.

Yes, that's exactly right. But I think something's out of whack. I turned the machine off for an hour to let it cool down. When I restarted, Defraggler said 20C but it's still red. I don't think it should still be red at that temp. On Vista it stays black all the time, not even green. Something's causing it to not display properly on one machine with XP and another with Vista. :(

No way 20? would be too high. I don't remember seeing a black icon.

You can also read temps with freeware provided by

OpenHardwareMonitor

SpeedFan

CoreTemp

I tried Speccy and it says the same temp as Defraggler, but it says "OK Less than 50C," so I'm not running hot, Defraggler's not displaying right for some reason. It's doing it on both of my machines so it must be something in my setup since they're both configured approx. the same. My mom's machine is okay, which doesn't have a lot of the customizations mine have. I'll keep toubleshooting and report back if I find a solution. :)

Maybe you have a buggy program. Why not just save your settings to ini file, then uninstall Defraggler, install anew from FileHippo?

That's what I had to do recently with CCleaner.

The installer was downloaded this morning from FileHippo. I uninstalled the old version, rebooted, and then installed. I just did a clean install from scratch but it still wants to display red for some reason. It's beginning to look like one of those deals where if I ever do figure it out, it'll be by accident...lol

When I use Windows Explorer and select My Computer it displays all my partitions

Withe the display mode set to "Tiles" each partition is shown like a thermometer with a blue band representing used space.

BUT if the FREE space is less than 10% the band is RED.

Could lack of free space case Defraggler to also show RED ?

Hi Super. I don't think it has anything to do with free space as I have plenty of that. I was reading in some other threads about color codes that warn you if your drive is about to die, but it was only being discussed as a possibility and I don't know if it's been implemented. And if it has, it seems like something that would apply to "Health" not "Temp," but I could be wrong about that.

I could understand Defraggler thinking my drive was about to die, as it is getting pretty old, but why is "Temp" red? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And if my drive's putting off a death vibe, why doesn't Speccy pick up on it? And also, on my Vista machine, which is only a couple of years old, Temp displays black. I think there's something very strange going on and I have no clue what it is. Just have to wait for a "happy accident" I guess. It's working fine otherwise. :)