Principles
Measurement integrity.
Some sensors can't be read on some motherboards. When that happens, Aikonic marks the value unavailable and says why. It does not fill the gap with a number it didn't measure.
One desktop, two gaps · example readout, styled for this page
No battery
This desktop has no battery, so there is no capacity to measure. With no number to show, none is shown.
verdict: unavailable · reason: no battery present, desktop system
Unavailable
The driver path most tools relied on is blocked on modern Windows. Most work around it quietly, or estimate. Clarity showed the gap instead, and since 1.1 reads the die through Aikonic's own signed, Microsoft-attested driver.1 Read the full story of the missing temperature.
verdict: unavailable · reason: kernel driver blocked by OS policy
The rules
- No composite health score
- Your PC is not “87 / 100”. A single score throws away the information you came for, so Aikonic shows the measurements instead.
- Nothing estimated
- Every value on screen was read from a sensor. Nothing is estimated, interpolated, or carried forward from a stale read and shown as live.
- No accuracy figure
- Each value is the sensor register's own, decoded as the library documents it, and names the sensor it came from. We have not measured our readings against a reference instrument, so we claim no tolerance. A reading taken from a fallback sensor is marked ~ and says why.
1 On Windows 11 24H2 and later, the kernel driver path most monitoring tools historically used is blocked by operating-system policy, which is why so many tools show CPU or GPU temperatures as unavailable, or guess. Since Aikonic 1.1, our own signed driver reads CPU die temperature directly; where a reading still cannot be made on your hardware, the app shows the gap with the reason instead of an estimate.
Privacy
Network calls.
Most monitoring tools publish what they collect. We can publish what we send, because the whole list fits on this page. The full privacy policy is the authoritative version.
| Call 01 · Licence validation | A first-launch registration; a paid licence also checks in about once a day. They carry a non-reversible install fingerprint made on your device; the raw identifiers never leave your computer and can't be recovered from it. There is no account. A Clarity install is tied to nothing else; a paid licence is tied, through its key, to the purchase record, which holds the email used at checkout. |
|---|---|
| Call 02 · Update check | An HTTPS request to aikonic.app for a small version file, carrying only the app's own version number in its User-Agent. It runs when the app starts, about every six hours while it stays open, and when you press Check for updates. Aikonic never downloads or installs an update on its own: when a newer version exists it shows a banner, and only when you choose does it fetch the signed installer, verify it against a key built into the app, and install it. |
| Nothing else | No telemetry, anonymised or otherwise. No crash reports, usage analytics or behavioural identifiers. No third-party SDKs of any kind. Even the fonts ship inside the installer rather than loading from a CDN. |
Download
Download Clarity.
Free, no account, no telemetry. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Signed installer, published checksum.