Q&A

Q: What are the biggest differences between the very popular and free AIDA32 program and Everest?

Everest took those [AIDA32] features to another level by adding Audit Manager to manage network audits and produce audit statistics; Change Manager to track changes between audit snapshots; and Database Manager to manage Everest SQL database. Also, Everest delivered the first CPU, FPU and disk benchmarks, Monitor Diagnostics and the quite popular System Stability Test module.

Q: How much new hardware do you receive every week?

It really depends on how much we need. When several brand new lines of products (e.g. Radeon HD 4000 series, Intel Atom CPUs) are released close to each other we get a lot of hardware in a single week. But sometimes no new hardware is rolled out for months, so in that case we can work on old issues. We get all sorts of things since Everest needs to identify any PC component you can think of.

Q: What has been the biggest challenge for Everest from a business standpoint?

A: From a business standpoint, the biggest challenge was to convince users that if they pay for Everest, they can get proper technical support, multiple version updates per year free of charge and constantly improved software in essence. We need to invest into new test hardware and equipment every week basically, and most of all we have to work constantly on adding new hardware and new technologies into the detection engine.

Q: What about from a technical standpoint?

If we look at the technical difficulties, the toughest challenge was and still is convincing big hardware manufacturers to provide access to the full technical documentation of their products. Without all the required documentation, it is quite hard to provide detection, benchmarks and temperature monitoring for all hardware components, and that makes my everyday job complicated and sometimes exhausting.

Q: Are you planning any new additions to Everest?

We always have fancy ideas about future versions, but we normally do not talk about them. One thing we definitely want to implement soon is alerting: so when temperature or voltage exceeds a preconfigured limit, or when a cooling fan stops, Everest pops up a message box and sends an email or shuts down the computer.