J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

VanguardLH WROTE:

On the Info tab, there is a "Find SMBus devices" button. Does it
find anything? I suspect the laptop came with bundled software. I
remember

When I click or otherwise activate the "Start scanning" button, it
presses and the dotted line around it goes, but nothing happens -
nothing appears in the window, and the button is still called "Start
scanning". I assume it scanned and didn't find anything.

The scan is very quick. Looks like Speedfan cannot find anything that
responds on the SMBus (assuming your laptop has that bus). There must
be an SM Bus Controller or System Management Controller chipset on the
mobo to support SMBus. The device must install an SMBus driver so it
can be queried on state of the device and to ask it to retrieve info
from the device.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us...-software.html
https://communities.intel.com/thread/110358

The chipset driver package from the mobo maker (or laptop maker, in your
case) must include an SMBus driver to perform the management. That is,
you need to install the chipset driver package (suite of drivers) so
Windows knows how to communicate with THAT hardware. When you go into
Device Manager (devmgmt.msc), do you see an SMBus Controller device? As
I recall, UMBus (User-Mode Bus enumerator) replaced SMBus as of Windows
Vista. It enumerates the devices found (that report themselves) on the
user-mode busses.

https://www.file.net/process/umbus.sys.html
Umbus.sys is a Windows driver. A driver is a small software program
that allows your computer to communicate with hardware or connected
devices. This means that a driver has direct access to the internals
of the operating system, hardware etc.

On my Windows 7 x64 setup, no "SMBus Controller" is listed but there are
a "UMBus Root Bus Enumerator" and two "UMBus Enumerator".

If I tick the Advanced box in that tab, a blank window comes up, with
Add and Remove tabs; if I click Add, it prompts for a name. If I type
test, it adds it to the empty box, but nothing else appears - no
controllers or anything.

After adding the "test" profile, did you click on that profile to select
it? Only when it is selected will the relevant fields show up below,
like Controller Speed (if you want to pick a method), Method, and
Temperatures (where you define setpoints for temperatures and fan speed
at those temperatures).

Since Speedfan found no fan devices on the SMBus/UMbus (assuming there
are any and that mobo's chipset drivers have the SMbus/UMbus drivers)
then it's not much of a surprise that this section remained blank. Your
hardware and driver setup isn't reporting anything for Speedfan to find.