Diagnostic Tools for Testing 2nd Hand Machines?

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."

Comments

SETI@home

[rainer_d]

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

For old machines, use old software.

[Deagol]

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...