HardwareVisualizer monitors local hardware health and performance. This glossary keeps product terms consistent across dashboard, persistence, and platform-specific hardware access discussions.
Hardware Monitoring: The app's ongoing activity of collecting and presenting local hardware status and utilization. Avoid: Monitoring, Storage Monitoring, telemetry
Hardware Dashboard: The Classic Navigation view where users inspect live CPU, memory, GPU, storage, network, process, and motherboard information at a glance. Avoid: Grouped Dashboard, Dashboard settings, insight page, system report
Performance Screen: The grouped-navigation destination for inspecting current hardware state together with short-window Usage Graphs. Avoid: Performance Tab, Grouped Dashboard, Insights Screen, Hardware Insight, hardware specifications
Performance View: A UI-local Performance Screen mode: Panels (Instrument Strip plus reorderable panels), Compact (dense small-window strip), or Monitor (full-height graph). Avoid: Performance Layout Preset, Detailed preset, Custom preset, Insights tab, saved report, navigation layout
Instrument Strip: The always-mounted live header of the Panels view: one hue-coded CPU, RAM, and GPU instrument combining a doughnut gauge, a short-window sparkline, and platform-dependent secondary readings. Avoid: Current Values panel, metric cards, gauge row
Selected GPU: The adapter whose live readings the Performance Screen shows, chosen explicitly by the user and kept while that adapter is still detected, even when it reports nothing. Avoid: active GPU, primary GPU, current graphics card, GPU tab
System Specifications Screen: The grouped-navigation destination that presents available hardware configuration, platform facts, capability-dependent observations, and Hardware Report access as one surface. Avoid: System Specifications Tab, Grouped Dashboard, Hardware Category Screen, standalone CPU screen, standalone GPU screen, System screen
Dashboard Item: An information block on the Hardware Dashboard that can be shown, hidden, or reordered. Avoid: Display Target, insight tab, graph target
Live Process Table: The Hardware Dashboard table that shows currently observed processes and their current resource usage. Avoid: Process Insight, process history, process table
Hardware Report: An export of the hardware configuration information currently available to the app. Avoid: Hardware Dashboard, Hardware Archive, utilization report, debug log
Usage Graph: A short-window live history chart of recent hardware utilization. Avoid: History, insight chart, hardware archive, snapshot chart
Power Draw: The live electrical power consumed by the CPU, GPU, Apple Neural Engine (ANE), and their derived package total, expressed in watts when the platform reports the required energy readings. Avoid: Energy usage, battery usage, power history, estimated TDP
Display Target: A hardware category selected for display in Usage Graphs. Avoid: Dashboard item, visible item, insight tab
Hardware Insight: A historical view of archived hardware performance metrics grouped by CPU, memory, or GPU subject and shown over a user-selected period. Avoid: History, live graph, dashboard graph
Insights Screen: The app screen that groups historical views such as Hardware Insight, Cooling Insight, Process Insight, and Insight Snapshot. Avoid: Hardware Insight, Storage Health Display, dashboard
Cooling Insight: A historical view for archived cooling-related metrics. Its initial display is CPU temperature; later displays remain capability-dependent as supported temperature, power, or fan data becomes available. Avoid: CPU/Memory Insight, live sensor panel, cooling dashboard
Process Insight: A historical view of notable processes from the Hardware Archive. Avoid: Live process table, task manager
Insight Snapshot: A filterable historical view that relates archived CPU or memory usage to process records for the same period. Avoid: Snapshot, storage health snapshot, live metrics snapshot, screenshot
Hardware Archive: Persisted CPU, memory, GPU, and process history, including available CPU and GPU temperature summaries and platform power-draw summaries, used to power Hardware Insights. Avoid: Storage health history, live history, dashboard state, settings archive
Retention Period: The length of time a persisted history is kept before old records are eligible for deletion. Avoid: Retention, refresh interval, cleanup schedule
Application Preference: A user-facing choice that users reasonably expect to persist as part of the app configuration. Avoid: UI cache, transient state, local selection
Classic Navigation: The opt-out navigation layout that preserves the previous five flat entries and their user-visible behavior while grouped navigation is the default. Avoid: legacy screen, old dashboard, fallback mode
UI-local State: Transient interface state that can be reset without losing an explicit user configuration. Avoid: Application preference, persisted setting
Tray Widget: A compact hardware-metrics display opened from or near the system tray. Avoid: Close to Tray, tray setting, tray
Close to Tray: The window-close behavior where the app stays running in the system tray instead of exiting. Avoid: Tray Widget, tray setting, minimize to tray
Elevated Startup Mode: A user preference for starting HardwareVisualizer with operating-system administrator privileges so privileged hardware access stays available across launches. Avoid: Admin mode, privileged core mode, installer option
Burn-in Shift: A display-protection feature that subtly moves long-lived UI content over time. Avoid: Screen saver, layout animation, window positioning
Storage Monitoring: Presenting current storage device capacity, free space, storage type, and filesystem information. Avoid: Storage health, SMART status, storage archive
Storage Health Collection: Obtaining storage device health signals so the application can retain a health record for a device. Avoid: SMART display, dashboard health row
Storage Health Record: A daily record of storage device health signals for one storage device on one local date. Avoid: Storage Health Snapshot, Hardware archive, raw SMART data, dashboard item
Storage Wear: A storage health signal estimating how much of a storage device's expected lifetime has been consumed, distinct from capacity usage. Avoid: Used, disk usage, capacity used, storage utilization
Storage Health Display: Presenting already available Storage Health Records in the user interface, including dashboard summaries and historical views. Avoid: SMART collection, storage health acquisition
Focus Storage Device: The storage device surfaced first in a Storage Health Display because its health state most needs the user's attention. Avoid: Representative drive, selected disk, SMART target
Selected Storage Device: The storage device the user explicitly chooses as the primary subject of a Storage Health Display, distinct from the automatically chosen Focus Storage Device. Avoid: Display Target, selected disk, SMART target
Live Storage Health: Current storage device health signals collected for immediate display and not retained as history, distinct from the daily Storage Health Record. Avoid: Storage Health Record, storage health snapshot, realtime SMART
Storage Device Refresh: The user-initiated action that re-detects connected storage devices, collects current health signals, updates today's Storage Health Record, and reflects added or removed devices in displays. Avoid: Rescan, reload, auto-detection, live polling
Motherboard Sensor Display: Presenting all available live motherboard temperature and fan-speed readings on the Performance Screen's Motherboard Sensors panel and on the Hardware Dashboard. Avoid: CPU thermal zones, GPU sensors, Storage Health Display
Sensor Source Label: A compact label that identifies where a live sensor reading came from, such as a provider, chip, or platform source. Avoid: Debug output, hardware report, install guidance
Fan Speed Reading: A live fan-speed value reported for a hardware fan source, typically shown as RPM. Avoid: Fan health, fan control, PWM setting
Inactive Fan Reading: A fan-speed reading of 0 RPM, meaning the fan is not currently spinning or not reporting rotation; it does not by itself prove disconnection or fault. Avoid: Disconnected fan, failed fan, missing fan
Active Fan Reading: A fan-speed reading above 0 RPM, meaning the fan is currently reporting rotation. Avoid: Healthy fan, connected fan
Invalid Fan Reading: A fan-speed reading that cannot be trusted for display because the reported value is outside the accepted reading shape. Avoid: Failed fan, broken fan
Ambient Temperature Reading: A room-temperature observation, optionally carrying relative humidity, taken by an environmental sensor outside the machine and used to explain machine temperatures. Avoid: CPU temperature, motherboard temperature, thermal zone, weather data
Ambient Sensor Availability: Whether an environmental sensor's readings are currently arriving, reported as available, stale, or never received, together with when it last succeeded. Avoid: Connection state, pairing status, link status, device health
Ambient Reading Freshness Window: How recently an Ambient Temperature Reading must have been observed to stand for the archive minute being written; an older reading leaves that minute without ambient data instead of repeating a past value. Avoid: Polling interval, sample rate, Retention Period
Thermal Delta: How far a machine's CPU package temperature sits above the Ambient Temperature Reading of the same archived minute, computed only for minutes carrying both readings so a warmer room can be told apart from worse cooling. Avoid: Temperature difference, delta T, temperature offset, cooling score
Ambient Coverage: How many of a day's archived minutes carried an Ambient Temperature Reading at all, whether or not the machine's own temperature could be read that minute. Avoid: Sample minutes, uptime, sensor availability
Thermal Delta Baseline: The Thermal Delta a machine settles at when idle, fixed from its first qualifying days once enough of them carry paired readings; established over its own collection period rather than the cooling baseline's, because a machine's ambient sensor is often added long after it started running. Avoid: Cooling baseline, reference temperature, calibration
External Component Guidance: A user-facing notice shown after hardware collection tries and cannot use an optional external runtime component, and fallback collection still leaves user-visible hardware data unavailable. Avoid: Startup dependency check, install prompt, dependency error, missing component alert
External Component Setup: The explicit, user-initiated action in which HardwareVisualizer downloads a pinned upstream release of an optional external component, verifies it, and installs it with the user's elevation consent, from the installer or from Settings. When started from Settings, it also performs an External Component Refresh. Avoid: Auto-install, bundled driver, dependency bootstrap, silent install, first-run setup
External Component Refresh: The maintenance step that replaces files of an already installed external component that match an older upstream release with the pinned release, and changes nothing else. See ADR 0026 for when it runs. Avoid: Auto-update, driver update, silent setup, module sync