HeavyLoad is a simple but effective tool for stress-testing your PC.

The program is very easy to use. Launch it, click the Start button, and HeavyLoad will immediately begin allocating memory, reading and writing to your hard drive, exercising your graphics card, and more, while its graphical display shows you exactly what's going on.

Why bother? This kind of utility has several applications.

If you believe your PC might be crashing when it overheats, for instance, running HeavyLoad will help test this.

If you've just overclocked your system then running HeavyLoad will check its stability.

And we regularly use HeavyLoad to test programs which claim they can optimise the processes running on your PC, for example to prevent "runaway processes" from grabbing all your CPU time.

Be careful, though. If your system really is unstable, then this kind of stress-test can cause it to lock up or crash. Be sure to save any important work in other apps before you give HeavyLoad a try.

What's new in v3.4?

•Please note: Windows XP and Server 2003 are no longer supported.

•Bugfix: The test method "Stress GPU" was unable to load textures to produce GPU utilization with current OpenGL drivers. The component used to produce the textures has been updated.

•Bugfix: Under Windows 10 individual CPU cores could not be utilized separately. This error has been fixed. The load threads allocated now explicitly individual CPU cores.

•Bugfix: The base load of HeavyLoad (when running without active tests) could be reduced to less than 5%. The load was caused by the calculation of real free memory in the StatusBar.

•The "Simulate Disc Access" test now uses the latest version of TreeSize Free (v3.4.5).

•A few minor fixes have been incorporated.

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