PC Workman v1.8.5 - Upgrade Readiness, a rebuilt Fan Dashboard, and a faster, more honest build

For the last stretch I shipped almost no new features. I spent the time on speed, on paying off a year of quiet technical debt, and on catching the places where my own app had been lying to me. It found four. Every one of them passed every test I had.

This is the fastest and the most honest build I have shipped. And it still gained the one feature people kept asking for.

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Upgrade Readiness - check a part before you buy it, fully offline

Ask "will an i5 11400F fit my board?" and PC Workman answers from a 330-entry offline library: it fits, it fits after a BIOS update, or it is the wrong socket and here is what the swap actually costs you (a new board, new RAM, a different cooler mount).

It knows the traps a spec sheet hides. A B460 board shares its exact socket with 11th-gen chips and still cannot run them. LGA1151 versions one and two look identical and are electrically incompatible. A B450 board runs a 5800X3D, but only after a BIOS flash. The engine encodes all of that per chipset, not just per socket.

• 188 CPUs (Intel 4th gen through Core Ultra 200S, AMD FX through Ryzen 9000), 84 GPUs, 58 chipsets.
• Live autocomplete: start typing a model and pick it from the list, no need to remember the exact name.
• Entry buttons sit at each part in My PC > Components. hck_GPT answers the same questions in chat.
• No internet, nothing leaves your machine.

This one came straight from the community. CBroz asked for a pre-upgrade compatibility checklist in the intents discussion months ago. Here it is.

Fan Dashboard is finally a tool

Old one was mostly a picture. The new one is a tool.

A heat-gradient curve that brightens to red as you raise it, dual percent and RPM axes, drag-safe points that cannot cross each other, and live fan rings that follow real sensors. There is a clear line between the curve you are editing and the plan you have applied, so touching a slider no longer silently changes your active setup.

hck_GPT button on the chart runs a temperature health check from your learned history and can apply a fan profile shaped from your own thermals.

Assistant got sharper

hck_GPT now holds the thread of a conversation. Ask it "what was that number?" a few messages later and it pulls the earlier answer back from a session ledger, so you never have to repeat yourself. It also reads Polish typed the fast way, without the diacritics. That last one was a genuine Unicode trap worth a sentence: the Polish letter ł has no decomposition, so it never folded down to l, and fixing it made the whole assistant better at real, quick typing.

• Greetings pull live numbers and nudge you toward the thing worth checking, instead of saying "hi" into the void.

Monitoring and learning

Voltage learning grew to cover CPU VCore and GPU core, not just board rails, and it now reads the sensor tree unit-aware, so a millivolt is never mistaken for a volt. When it flags something, the anomaly lands in the Events log with the context that makes it useful:* _not "82 degrees", but "82 degrees in a gaming workload, when your normal for this load is 57 to 71"**._

• Per-process CPU is now measured on the whole-machine scale too, so one busy thread on a twelve-thread chip no longer reads a false "100 percent" and sets off a phantom alert.

The app is faster and leaner

My PC used to take about two seconds to open. It is now built once and kept alive, so re-entry now takes between 1 and 17 milliseconds. The real cause was two blocking wmic calls sitting on the interface thread, each with a three-second timeout, and on Windows 11 24H2 wmic is slow. Both now read the hardware identity that is warmed at startup. Sidebar builds its subitems lazily. Steady-state window startup dropped to roughly 190 milliseconds.

Four lies I caught

• The fan curve "Apply" button showed a success message and saved nothing. Every restart threw your settings away in silence.
• The window titled itself v1.8.1 while the single-instance check searched for a v1.8.2 title, so launching the app a second time stopped focusing the running one, for two whole releases.
• A TURBO switch was drawn on screen and wired to nothing.
• Frozen builds reported a stale "1.8.0" in telemetry, reading a file that is not shipped inside the package.

The version now lives in exactly one file, and a test fails the build on any hardcoded copy. Each of the other lies has a ratchet test that fails if it ever comes back. The app also leaves evidence now: a watchdog dumps every thread's stack when the interface stalls, and a real error log catches the exceptions the toolkit used to swallow.

Small things that add up

• The launcher shows the real brand mark now. It was quietly resolving the logo by a path that only worked while I developed, so the shipped build fell back to plain text. Fixed, with the red brand bars where they belong.
• The process library grew from 373 to 485 named processes, so more of what runs on your machine gets a real explanation instead of a shrug.

Under the hood

The 6,533-line hck_GPT response builder is now a facade over eight focused modules. Guided flows and a response ledger were added (96 intents). The sidebar was restructured. The test suite went from 21 in June to 194.

Built in the evenings

A word on how this gets made, since some of you have asked. I build PC Workman after work, and my work is welding plastic in a shop that is always too warm. This release took a while precisely because most of it was the quiet kind of work: splitting a 6,533-line file into eight, chasing a two-second delay to its real cause, writing tests for bugs no user will ever see.

None of it makes a good screenshot. All of it is why the next feature is cheaper to build. When PC Workman landed on the Microsoft Store, it quietly stopped being my hobby and became something strangers install and rely on. I have treated it differently ever since, and this release is what that looks like.

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Install

No accounts, no cloud, nothing leaves your machine.

• GitHub / SourceForge: download [PC_Workman_HCK_1.8.5.zip](https://sourceforge.net/projects/pc-workman-hck/files/latest/download), extract, run the .exe. No Python needed.
• Microsoft Store: the 1.8.5 update follows a couple of days after this release. If you installed from the Store, PC Workman updates itself, or you update it with one click. No uninstall, no ZIP hunting.

Security

Every build is Sigstore-signed, clean on VirusTotal (0/70), and checked by CodeQL on every commit. Network access is disabled by default. If you enable it in Settings, PC Workman can send an optional anonymous hardware snapshot—never your files or the processes you run.

The receipts

Metric	Result
My PC re-entry	~2 s -> 1-17 ms
Steady-state window init	~190 ms
Automated tests	21 (June) -> 194
Offline compat library	188 CPUs, 84 GPUs, 58 chipsets
Process definitions	373 -> 485
hck_GPT intents	96

Thank you

To every tester who spent hours breaking things I would never have found alone, and to everyone in the discussions whose question turned into a feature. CBroz and Nastia87y, two of the headline features this release are yours.

If an AI lived inside your PC, what is the first thing you would ask it? The best questions keep becoming code.

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Built by Marcin "HCK" Firmuga · HCK_Labs · MIT License · https://pcworkman.dev