Personal SmartCheck is software developed by URL Toy Software. In several ways, Personal SmartCheck is similar to Advanced SmartCheck especially in terms of function but they also have their glaring differences.

While Advanced SmartCheck has applicability in a network computer, Personal SmartCheck is exclusive to a personal computer. Personal SmartCheck is a unique software that provides comprehensive and detailed information pertaining to the health of the hard drives on your computer.

S.M.A.R.T monitors a number of parameters which it uses to calculate the possible failure of the hard disk in the future. There are a number of pointers that enable the technology to effectively carry out this action.

For example, the failure of the bearing and/or motor can be predicted when there is a surge in the spin-up time of the drive as well as the number of retries before the drive is successfully spun up. Also, an instance where the drive excessively makes use of error correction can be an indication of contamination or a broken drive head.

Personal SmartCheck makes the most recent details of your computer hard drive's health available to you. It predicts the nearest T.E.C (Threshold Exceed Condition) of the hard drive giving you ample time to back up your documents to prevent the loss of valuable data.

Unlike Advanced SmartCheck which needs to be launched through the menu or hotkeys each time, Personal SmartCheck can be minimized to run in the background. When it is minimized, it displays an icon with the temperature reading of the hottest hard drives in the system tray. Clicking on the icon using a mouse will show more detailed temperature information about the temperature of the hard drives.

A balloon pops us up with a hint to notify you when the temperature of the hard drive goes beyond a set threshold. The minimal requirements your computer system should meet for the Personal SmartCheck to run are as follows:

  • Processor vendor: Intel or other processors with 100 percent compatibility
  • Processor seed: at least 500 MHz
  • Hard disk space: at least 10 MB
  • RAM: needs to be greater than 16 MB

Personal SmartCheck is compatible with Microsoft Windows versions 9X, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and 2003. You may encounter some glitch when trying to run this software on later windows versions considering that the software is no longer under development.

When it comes to upgrades, Advanced SmartCheck got a higher favor from the developers compared to the Personal SmartCheck. While the development of the former continued up to 2011, the last release date for an update for Personal SmartCheck was on September 25, 2008

Also, the last version of Personal SmartCheck to be released was the version 4.0. In this version, the problem where two or more drives of the same model were read as the same drive by the software was corrected. It also came with a newer drive detection method that permitted the detection of SATA and IDE drives bigger than 500 GB. It also had support for some external USB and HDD.

Like Advanced SmartCheck, up to 70 percent of hard drive errors can also be detected with the Personal SmartCheck. This is obviously because they run on the same S.M.A.R.T technology (the technology responsible for the hard drive error detection).

Both softwares are available for a limited day's trial period. As you would expect, the full version of both software come at a price. However, the last version (4.0) of the Personal SmartCheck will cost you $19.95 whereas the latest version of the Advanced SmartCheck will cost you $29.95.

Unlike in the case of the Advanced SmartCheck where the information is collated and sent to the Network Administrator periodically, Personal SmartCheck provides immediate notification to the user. In the former, there is every chance that the network administrator might ignore the message.