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Diagnostic Tools for Testing 2nd Hand Machines?

Posted by Cliff on from the run-it-thru-its-paces-before-you-buy-it dept.

tom asks: "Buying second hand computers you always run a risk. I was wondering if the slashdot readers could suggest a toolbox of (preferably small) tools that you could take along with you on one or two floppy's so you could run some diagnostics on machines you would consider buying. I'm thinking of the checkdisks, benchmark programs, soundcard checks, USB checks etc."

3 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. SETI@home by rainer_d · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you have the time, try running the SETI@home-client for 24h - and then install FreeBSD, make world, compile KDE3, mozilla and OpenOffice from ports.
    (>6 GB disk-space needed, though)

    SETI will bring the CPU to the limit. If it's overclocked and/or badly cooled or otherwise unstable, you'll see that quickly.

    The rest will stress-test your IO-capabilities ;-)

    If it survives all that, then it looks like you can trust the system quite a bit.

    Rainer

    --
    Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
  2. For old machines, use old software. by Deagol · · Score: 3, Insightful
    My favorite pre-web ftp site (after the original SIMTEL archive went down) was Garbo: ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi. It's web-enabled now (change "ftp" to "http" in the url), though most stuff is really dated now.

    Scrounge around the "sysinfo" and "sysutil" directories. There are a bunch of old utils that do what you're looking for.

    There was a german DOS utility. I can't remember the name, but I think it was simply "config" (or was it "pcconfig" or "pcinfo"?). Anyway, that utility could identify damned near anything in a PC (CPU, chipsets, memory, motherboard, etc.) and it ran some diagnostics. I tried to locate it again for this post, but I couldn't find it. If anyone knows where it went...

    --
    Method of processing duck feet
  3. My Mini-CD Consists of.. by xchino · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I cary a 3.5" mini cd full of diagnostics programs for winblows, because god knows you need them when dealing with windows and windows users. Here is a list of what's on the disc. First of all it's a basic MS-DOS bootable disk with all the functionality of a regular MS-DOS boot CD (fdisk, format, edit, etc) and a few utilities such as
    Fresh Diagnose
    VNC server and viewer
    NessusWX
    Fresh Diagnose is an excellent benchmark/testing utility.
    VNC is for accessing remote desktops (Great for lazy people such as myself)
    NessusWX is a windows interface for Nessus security scanner. A must for checking default installations of any OS.
    All the extra utilites are freeware. MS-DOS is of course copyrighted.

    hth

    --
    Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.