Your temperatures, in the corner of the game.

Not for the GPU — temperature and load work the moment you run Kent, with no driver and no administrator rights.

The CPU is different. Windows gives an ordinary program no way to read die temperature, so it takes a small signed kernel driver called PawnIO. Kent fetches the official installer, checks who signed it, and runs it — one consent prompt, no website to go find. It then puts a small background reader in place so the gauge keeps working without Kent itself ever running as administrator.

Skip it and Kent simply shows — for the CPU. It does not use WinRing0, which Microsoft blocklists as a security risk.

Kent never touches the game. It is a top-most transparent window that the Windows desktop composites on top of everything, which is a completely different mechanism from the overlays that inject a DLL and hook the renderer to draw an FPS counter.

There is no FPS or frametime counter either, and there will not be — not because of this, but because Kent measures the machine rather than whatever happens to be running on it.

The game is almost certainly in true exclusive fullscreen, which bypasses the desktop compositor entirely — no overlay of this kind can appear over it. Switch the game to borderless or windowed and Kent comes back.

The alarm sound is deliberately not affected, because it is the one channel that still works while a game has the screen.

You will see a blue window headed Windows protected your PC. The button that continues is behind More info — click that, then Run anyway. Some browsers warn about the file before that, for the same reason.

That screen is Microsoft Defender SmartScreen, and it does not mean Windows found anything wrong with Kent. It means Windows cannot tell who made it: a publisher proves that by signing its programs with a certificate it has bought, and Kent does not have one yet. Every new unsigned program gets this screen, however harmless it is — the warning is about the missing paperwork, not about the file.

You can check the file instead of taking the message's word for it. Every release publishes a fingerprint of each download beside it, in SHA256SUMS, and Get-FileHash in PowerShell prints the same fingerprint for a file that arrived intact. A signing certificate is the next milestone, and this screen goes away with it.

No telemetry, no analytics, no account, no logs on disk. Kent makes exactly three kinds of network request. It fetches the PawnIO installer if you set up the CPU gauge, which only ever happens when you ask. And a few minutes after it starts, then once a day for as long as it stays open, it reads a small file on this site to see whether a newer Kent exists, so that it can update itself without interrupting you. That check sends nothing about you or your machine, and Automatic updates in the tray menu switches it off. Check now, on the About tab of the settings, runs the same check whenever you ask.

Report…, in About, sends a problem or an idea to whoever makes Kent, and only when you press Send, having seen all that goes: what you wrote, the version and, unless you switch them off, the Windows version and a few facts about this Kent, such as its language and how it reads the processor and the graphics card. What Kent adds never includes the model of your processor or graphics card, a reading, a path or a file.

By default, a fraction of your own part's thermal limit rather than a fixed number — 85 °C is routine on a part that throttles at 100 and alarming on one that throttles at 90. That is what makes the default correct on hardware Kent has never seen.

You can pin an exact temperature per part instead. There is one threshold, not one per channel: it governs the colour, the blink, the sound and the notification together.

Intel and AMD Zen (family 17h and later) for the CPU; NVIDIA and AMD for the GPU. Windows 10 and 11, x64. The AMD paths follow the same registers as Libre Hardware Monitor but have not been run on real hardware yet — if you have an AMD machine, a probe report is the most useful thing you could send.

English, Português, Español, Deutsch, Français, Italiano, Polski, Русский, 中文, 日本語 and 한국어, following your Windows display language, with a tray override.

Run kent.exe --probe. It writes kent-probe.txt beside the executable: what Kent detected, which vendor libraries loaded, whether it is elevated, and why a sensor is missing. Send it with your report — the address is in Kent's About tab. Kent keeps no logs, so that file is the whole picture.