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Good, Affordable PC Diagnostic Software?
"The premise of PC diagnostics software is simple: provide an easy way to test for PC hardware problems, independent of software configuration. Some hardware vendors (like Dell) provide diagnostics with their systems, but they are usually model-specific and not even all major vendors provide them. Of course there are free utilities like the well-known memtest86, but I was wanted something more comprehensive.
So I started my research, and found a variety of packages, including PC Doctor, PC Check, Microscope, PC Certify, Tufftest Pro, among many others, ranging in price from $500 to $35. Some come with associated hardware, such as loopback connectors for parallel, serial, network or USB ports, or ISA / PCI cards that will show low-level POST codes for machines that appear completely dead.
Some of the vendors provided demos, but most were severely crippled. The cheaper software tended to be outdated and incomplete, lacking support for newer hardware features. Almost all practiced high-pressure sales tactics over the phone, and I discovered that one company was actually a spinoff of another by a disgruntled former employee, resulting in a bitter, lawsuit-ridden feud.
Microscope, by Micro 2000, seemed to have the most online feedback, mostly positive, but they didn't provide a demo. After contacting their sales, they suggested that if I bought a full copy for my evaluation, I could return it in 30 days if it didn't meet my needs. Well, it turned out to be buggy and missing important features found in other, cheaper products. When I called to return the product, the salesman disclaimed all knowledge of the promise they made, and they've refused to take it back. Some further digging found that I'm not the first person to be taken in by these tactics.
I still would like to find worthwhile PC diagnostics software, but the (a) lack of independent reviews, (b) shady industry sales tactics and (c) poor performance of a 'well regarded' package leave me wondering... am I a sucker for buying into the whole concept in the first place? Can anyone point me towards a reputable vendor, or an alternative set of independent tools that will do the same job?"
SiSoft's Sandra is good for some basic hardware info on the machine.
It was nice finding out that the RAM I bought from Coast-to-Coast memory that I got a "deal" on was actually a step down in terms of speed (which they were selling for the "sale" price...so it all worked out).
They have diagnosit tests, but I've only used the free version. But its a nice first-line strategy for sizing up machines.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
A low-cost alternative is a bootable copy of Knoppix, escpecially usefull if equipped with a virus scanner - like/ 93.php>Knopicillin - sorry no ISO Image found - it was once in the C'T magazine...
http://www.linuxforum.com/linux_wallpapers_full
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
If you like dell diagnostics, then you should probably buy PCdoctor. Atleast some of the diagnostics in the earlier versions of Dell servers were sublicensed from PCdoctor. Just go into the installation folder and liik at the DLL names, or read a config file.
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
The Troubleshooter by SmartCertify direct. It comes as a bootable floppy, with a couple of dongles and a CD-ROM to test ports while in diagnostic mode. This has worked excellently for us...we were able to diagnose some odd, random computer issues as being caused by bad video RAM
If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
Nothing beats experience and a supply of 'known good' replacement parts. I have been out of the repair and troubleshooting business for years, but I always remember being frustrated at useless memory and system testing software that could not find anything wrong with memory chips, etcs, that were obviously bad. Even most hardware units (like ram testers) were almost useless. If the POST testing didn't find anything wrong, it seemed almost nothing else would either, most of the time. If you think the part is bad, swap it out with an equivalent and see if the problem goes away.
You can get so much information from a knoppix CD, it's just not worth looking anywhere else.
And that's why... Most technicians do it by instinct and years of experience. If this peticular thing is happening, you know it could be one of x, y, or z.
:)
That's always worked better for me than anything else. Although it would be nice to have something tell me what's wrong
Sandra is a good info/benchmark util.
For windows machines, I found a little app called RegSupreme which actually does a good job of cleaning/fixing keys in the registry.
Best "tool" for tech support is a good working knowledge of the PC. If you're looking for a piece of software to do support for you, then I'm sure the rest of the self proclaimed "IT Guru's" here at slashdot will warm a spot for you in the unemployment line.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This is slightly OT, but I've found one of the best ways to test (as opposed diagnose) hardware is to install FreeBSD then run "make buildworld" on it... If it completes with no problems, it's a pretty good indication that the hardware is in good condition.
A tip: run it as Administrator or you'll get limited information out of the BIOS. And if you're using *nix, you'll have to look elsewhere.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
After demonstrating the (reproducible) problem the vendor replaced the second SIMM and all was well.
stressing under the weight of years worth of hardware & software Bibles. If there is such a miracle as a good diagnostic program that can keep up with the daily onslaught of new hardware, protocols and standards, then I have wasted a lot of my time but wish you the best of luck on your quest.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
True, in a world where a faulty SCSI terminator can cause intermittent behavior (Thanks a lot, SUN!) There's nothing like spare parts to swap in and out.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Memtest is a great tool, however it is specificaly mentioned in the article itself.
If you read the article, RebornData is looking for something more comprehensive than memtest offers. (ie: more than just a memory test. I assume to include disk, bios, video, cpu information, and a variety of other system tests and checks.)
I myself question the need for much more than a disk-surface-scan tool and a copy of memtest, but it's what RebornData is looking for.
-Matt
The best tools for checking memory are memtest86 and the follow-up memtest86+.
Both of these are free to download and use. I usually leave them running for roughly 24hrs for a reasonable level of confidence. You should also burn-in the other major components too but memory is the best place to start.
#1 TuffTEST pro is a cheap, bootable, hardware-only diagnostic. It supports all current x86 processors. It does not work on top of DOS or Windows or anything, so it's convenient for eliminating the hardware as a problem. Works great, I use it all the time. As a side note, if you use it on Dell machines, Dell seems to have an internal loopback on the serial and parallel ports. It will report the ports are OK even if they're not. http://www.tufftest.com/
I use the ulitmatebootcd. It consolidates several good boot floppy images onto one cd, including many free hardware diagnosis programs.
It is not possible to diagnose hardware by running software on it. At best you can determine if there is a hardware failure, but no software will be able to nail it down to a specific component all of the time.
Consider a motherboard failure for instance - a failing motherboard can in effect emulate any other hardware failure - ide controller bad? Your software may blame the hard drive. Bus problems can cause memory checks to fail.
I recommend you carry a simple bootable cdrom that loads the entire system (disk i/o, memory i/o and cpu load) and checks for errors. When a system fails these checks all it tells you is the problem is definately hardware and not a buggy driver or other software issue.
See BartPE for a good free solution.
PC hardware is shit. Made as cheaply as possible, knocked out by the million. Nothing gets repaired - nothing is repairable. If it's broken, buy a new one.
PC software is shit. Software is still in the dark ages. No qualifications to show who has the first clue about quality, security, extensibility etc.
If you get any problem you can't fix in 30 mins, best to make sure you've backed up everything important (naturally you never need to ask anyone whether this is the case, because everybody always backs up their important data on a daily basis, right?), then just format or ghost the fucking disk. End of problem, and no tedious troubleshooting what happens when you try and get a LameSoft2000 graphics card working with a ShysterTronics printer.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
...the best software i've ever encountered was inside my skull....
if electricity is created by electrons, is morality created by morons?
I have yet to find diagnostic software that is more reliable than my own expereince/instincts. I haven't really done an exhaustive search, but the handful that I have used tend not to work well (and take...too...long...).
Most OEM's are fairly accomodating if you describe problems in a decent amount of detail (and the machine is under warranty).
If these are white boxes, you're probably better off keeping a pile of spare parts around. A quick swap can get a machine up and running quickly.
Good Luck!
I will resort to diagnostics only when other troubleshooting is unrevealing, but the diagnostics for whichever hardware you have are usually provided by the manufacturer. For example, each hard drive manufacturer will have its own diagnositcs and if you expect warranty returns, you will have to run their program and tell them what fails.
Free for personal use, businesses must register. Well worth it.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
aida32 is a very good tool to get information about your hardware and software... (similar to sandra)
And it is free.
http://www.aida32.hu/aida32.php
Most all the modern distros have comprehensive tools for checking the filesystems and analysis of the machine's hardware (including cool stuff like tweaking the hard drives/etc).
Random case studies WRT normal Linux operations vs. normal MS-Windows operations in the case of 'marginal' hardware situations:
Case 1: Gateways' shiped with the 'dreaded' Quantum SCSI disk drives:
We bought a couple of Gateway workstations that Gateway shipped with Quantum 9gig W/F SCSI disk drives (avoid these like the plague). With one machine, we tossed the pre-installed MS-Windows (95?) and installed RedHat Linux (5.2 or maybe 6.1). The other machine got MS-Windows NT 4.0 installed. After about 1 month, the machine with Linux installed reported disk I/O errors (and crashes). The machine would recover (fsck after hard reset in a couple of cases) -- the disk had not totally farmed, just started to lose it. We got a replacement disk (IBM) from Gateway and did a disk-to-disk transfer (dump | restore, partition by partition) and used a boot floppy to re-boot and install lilo. This was some years ago. The 'NT box reported no problems until after about 6-7 months of use. Then crashed and refused to reboot. Disk was close to complete death. We suspect that the disk in the 'NT box was probably starting to go at the same time as the disk in the Linux box, but MS-Windows NT failed to notice *minor* disk I/O errors.
Case 2: Token MS-Windows box goes off line and gets converted to a take-home Linux machine:
We had a Gateway G6-200 (PPro 200mhz) machine that was the lab's 'token' MS-Windows box (NT 4.0). For various reasons (including lack of serious use), we took it off line. Later we needed a take-home box, so we *tried* to install Linux on it. The install kept crashing. No apparent reason way. Finally, we swapped out the RAM SIMMs, and presto, Linux installed properly. I guess the RAM had developed some bad bits, and MS-Windows NT failed to notice...
*Maybe* 'NT is notorious about not noticing hardware failures. Maybe Linux is really very sensitive to "minor" hardware problems (slowly developing failures).
The only effective hardware tests I've used in the ten years I've been supporting all kinds of hardware and software have been SpinRite and Memtest86. Between these two, I can check for the most insidious and hard-to-detect hardware problems; i.e. flakey hard drives and RAM. A cheap $20 POST card is highly useful for dead machines. You don't need all the extra features the Microscope card gives you unless you are designing motherboards or doing some other such serious work. No software will replace your own experience and ability to know where a problem is forming based on the specific failure of the machine. All the rest of the so-called diagnostic software is more or less useless from a practical perspective, aside from testing serial ports with loopback plugs and printing cute certification reports for anal customers. This is detective work. You have to suss out the exact problem based on clues left by the failure of the system. Learn how the hardware works, and it's easier than you think.
Learn how a CPU works before you learn to program. Seriously.
for tweaking your display. An absolute must have.
I have tried to find this, but the problem with getting flawed hardware to run software to detect it is flawed is just that in concept.
First of all, if it is an issue with hardware, the machine may not boot at all. If it is a ram issue, the diagnostic software may generate errors.
Second, even if it highlights an error in a configuration, it could be generated with the analysis software.
Third is that failed hardware often will not register as failed unless it is operating. Such as, a failed modem will not become noticable until it is used and then it may lock the computer up which could stop the software diagnosing the issue.
Your best bet is to use a cause and effect analysis. Then trial and error. The machine won't boot, find every possible cause of it not booting and eliminate each one as a possible cause. Continue on this until the issue is completely solved. Make a checklist for yourself so you don't forget anything.
It is how I do freelance repairs and it has proven bulletproof compared to the Voodoo Computer Repair Experts that try random things in the hope that it fixes the issue. (Install drivers, reinstall OS, Check CPU)
I've heard and read great things about Spinrite from Steve Gibson, for hard drive diagnostics and I have friends that swear by it. The only drawback to his current version is that it won't do a thing for NTFS partitions. That being said, he is working on Spinrite 6.0 that WILL read NTFS partitions. This new edition is due out any time now. If you buy Spinrite 5 you get a free upgrade to 6 when it becomes available. As far as a general software based, pc diagnostic tool, I've yet to see any that actually work with any degree of certainty. SiSoft Sandra, as others have mentioned, is pretty good at letting you know what hardware is in the box. That along with some available "known good parts" is what I do to diagnose issues. I have also found the book Upgrading and Repairing PC's to be particularly valuable and a must have in my collection.
Money not found! A)bort, R)etry, D)eclare Bankruptcy
As others mentions, memtest86 and knoppix are invaluable tools.
/var/log/messages ;-)
Other tools you might be interested in;
Aida32 basically lists all of your devices, drivers, wmi software entries, pci devices, etc. for windows - needs an install, though.
OnTrack sell Easy Recovery Professional; the "file repair" options are pretty crappy, but for serious, near-forensic recovery on fscked up filesystems, ERP is a fine tool. Some of OnTrack's software (i.e. SMART tests, usually) may be licensed by the manufacturer of your harddrive, so check those pages out.
SiSoft Sandra is recommended a lot, but I don't find it offers a lot of diagnostics, though it is prone to crashing.
On windows, you might want to check out the Event Viewer, hidden in the Computer Management section of the (classic) Control Panel -- it will list all sorts of errors and notifications, kind of like
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I've taken an ailing HP Omnibook 4150 laptop to my local computer repair place where I was told (in this order) :
1. I needed a new power supply.
2. I needed a new motherboard.
3. They didn't really know what was wrong with it.
It suffers from intermittent power failure, otherwise it runs fine. I wish I knew how to locate the trouble or if I'm just wasting my time thinking this machine can be fixed. I'm loathe to take it to another repairman, I'm already out some $$ that got me no closer to a real solution. I hope this is an appropriate question to ask, 'cause I like that machine and would rather not junk it. Any civil advice will be vastly appreciated (including suggested URLs for diagnostic tools such as those mentioned in the original article). TIA!
Btw, the repair house told me that their "diagnostics" consisted of letting the machine run for a day or two. I paid them their bench fee and swore I'd never take another machine there again.
A great, free, Windows program is AIDA32. It gives lots of valuable info. It's not perfect, but it's constantly in development and improvement. Up until about a week ago there was a DOS/16-bit version available, but due to lack of demand it was discontinued (sadly). Another ok program is PC-Config, which is no longer being worked on, but it's pretty good. And NSSI is really pretty nice as well.
Check those out.
Knoppix - verify the part under another OS.
Tomsrtbt - I forget if Knoppix has badblocks or not. If it doesn't, Tomsrtbt does.
memtest86 - Memory tester.
Spare HDD - good for having a clean install of windows to check things on.
Spare low-density memory.
Spare older computer for testing daughtercards.
That's about it.
Of course, sooner or later you *will* get the machine from hell with an intermediate fault that ends up locking windows for no damn good reason every so often. Then life will suck. But that's why they call it work.
If you pay with a credit card and the vendor tries to screw you over you can contest the billing and return the unsatisfactory product, In fact I am in the process of cancelling an order i placed for Serif's Photoplus 7 because the site selling it never mentioned that it was old and shitty, but they were perfectly happy to tell me how bad it was when they called me asking if i wanted to pay $50-$90 to upgrade to version 8 or 9... obviously contesting the charge is a last resort but overall I feel much more confident buying software online because i know that i am not out the money untill i actually pay the credit card bill (for internet purchases there is no signature)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I was a PC repairman for many years. I say from experience that all those software diagnostics suck.
Microscope from Micro2000 is actually the best of the bunch, but that's not saying much. If your computer won't even post, non of these tools will do you any good. (They do have some good training materials for those wanting an A+ or N+ COMPTIA cert.)
The PCI cards that display diagnostic codes are better than the software in those cases. They still aren't very helpful though. Basically they will tell you there is a problem with the memory, or the parallel port, etc., but they won't tell you exactly what's wrong so they aren't of much use either.
Here's my advice:
1. Get the power supply tester from PC Power & Cooling. It's $20, and in my experience most of the time the reason a computer won't even post is because the cheapass power supply that came with the case died.
2. Carry a bunch of known good parts: an AGP and a PCI video card you know work, a PCI network card and PCI modem, some known good RAM (PC 100 and DDR), and a good hard drive. Ideally, these are all in a fully working computer you've brought to the site so you can swap between the working computer and the not-working computer and narrow down the problem. Resist the temptation to fix the system with your known good parts; make them buy new, name-brand components with a warranty.
3. Bring a USB keyboard and mouse. I've seen lots of 3+ year old computers have their PS/2 connections short out or stop working but their USB ports are just fine. They can solve input problems.
4. Have a Knoppix CD in your kit. The linux forensic toolkit can be of great use recovering files and finding problems.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
That the free stuff is just as good (if not better) than high-priced diag software.
Allow me to give you some background:
I have done IT work for 4.5 years. I work with Novell, RedHat, all (disgusting) flavours of Windows, BeOS, Sun, SGI, Apple (Mac) and QNX. I support everyone from Joe Grandma to major Universities and Medical Colleges.
I have several CDs worth of useful tools at my disposal, all of them free:
Ad-Aware: I consider this to be my single best resource in the fight against Windows NT (and up) flakery.
www.trendmicro.com does an on-line virus scan. Not perfect, but usually finds the major ones.
Demos of Anti-Trojan. Again, good enough for the closing of trojan ports left open.
AVG Anti-Virus software. Good, free AV software, if Norton isn't available.
Winzip: Obviously a good thing, many many drivers come zipped.
A CD full of the most common NIC drivers from the biggest vendors.
nVidia and ATI drivers.
Via drivers
All the latest browsers on another CD.
MemTestx86 (as you have found): Allow me one point further int he favor of it, major memory makers will accept their RAM bad, no questions asked (in my experience) if you tell them it was checked and found bad, via MemTextx86.
SiSoft Sandra, if for nothing else than the CPU-Burn wizard. If the CPU is bad, Sandra will find out.
Emergency Boot disks and cd-rom access disks (sadly, the Win98 boot disk is pretty handy)
A live Linux and live BeOS CD (very handy for recovering data of hosed systems)
And last, but not least, a good Google search. Another thing that has saved my skin time and again is to input exact error messages and see what Google turns up.
This whole cd-wallet has set me back perhaps $20, and does far more than "professional" diag tools can hope to accomplish.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I manage a second level support group at a fairly large company. We've found that On-Track's
Easy Recovery Professional is AWESOME. It fixes 200-some file extensions. All office suite files, zips, etc. We used it a lot on enormous PST files that would blow up at 2gb~. It fixes them in half the time of M$'s ScanPST tool.
Further, this product will do all sorts of HDD checks, and can does great file recovery. It's saved our asses a bunch of times. Just take a read.
It might seem kind-of expensive to someone on their own, but not to a mid-sized company. It's worth it's weight to me. They do have different licensing options and offer different/lighter versions of the product for less $$$.
The sucky thing about it's licensing scheme is that it's based on how many drives you run it on.
I've also heard that wininternals has an great product but if I remember correctly it was really expensive.
I've had a few questions I'd love to pose to the /. community but I knew were unworthy.
Where would you suggest such questions be posed?
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
www.mihr.com
PC diagnostics are really two-part work. Part one is to fix the PC, and part two is to convince the luser that the machine is actually fixed. That's where the diagnostic software comes in handy. Run the software, show the luser the "problem", fix the PC, and show the luser that the problem is "fixed". I've found that a piece of paper in a luser's hand is worth hours and hours of post-fix re-diagnostics because "something" has changed.
In my experiance, the best hardware for diagnosing PC hardware problems is another PC that you know works. Quite frankly, the built in diagnostic capabilities of PC hardware is extremely poor, the only reliable way to discover if a part if bad is to replace it with a known good part and see if that fixes the problem. Don't blindly trust new or especially refurbished parts either, they need to be tested and known good. With experiance you will know what parts to try first, but it is still important to verify that replacing the failed component with a new part fixes the problem.
I remember back at school where the tech support guys were ripping their hair out because a lot of the school issued PCs were coming back with random crashing problems. (I had a roommate who's machine would crash everytime the screensaver kicked in). They were replacing parts left and right and it never seemed to fix the problem. My roommate had everything replaced except the case at one part, and it still crashed on a vanilla Win3.1 install. It took them awhile to realize that most of the machines had bad memory, and the vendor supplied replacement memory for the systems was usually bad as well. I eventually loaned my roommate my memory sticks, and when his system didn't crash he went back to the PC guys and told them exactly what the problem was and made them continue swapping in RAM sticks until they finally found one that worked (apparently the RAM was OK in their hardware RAM tester, but failed once it was actually put in PCs. They suspected the same thing was happening at the vendors end. They would get bad memory, test it and not discover a problem, then ship it right back to the school.
I read the internet for the articles.
echo "the presence of this routine has doubled the number of diagnostic programs available for the mac"
I would check out the 911 rescue CD if you cannot figure out how to use a knoppix CD.
http://www.911cd.net
You will have to download all the tools required seperately and have your own windows CDs to create the boot images on a single disk.
Check it out it's a freeware project.
Anyway, certainly he *mentions* memtest86 but he didn't say that he used it - wanting 'something more comprehensive'. I am suggesting that he shouldn't be so dismissive given that experience suggests testing the memory properly is a good place to start.
Why he wants a costly, all-in-one package rather than a comprehensive set of free tools seems peculiar to me (and to other posters).
He didn't mention memtest86+ either.
i use microscope. my business bought it, and its a $600 buy in a believe. comes with a POST card (very handy for troubleshooting non-POSTing mobo's and a bootable diskette that does all kinds of good testing. we also got it on cd for an extra $10. i use it all the time. for testing harddrives, i use seatools from seagate on bootable cd.
Uh, yeah.. No, about half our customers' problems at our Support firm are over Norton Utilities or SystemWorks, or some other Symantec product breaking and screwing up the OS. Happens daily. They don't learn anything, but how to manually uninstall a Norton Product.
We are an IBM shop (By state mandate) so I am a bit biased. You said manufacturer versions are model specific, but I doubt IBM's is, because they use the same PC doctor program for the last 10 years worth of laptops, workstations and x86 based Servers. It comes on a bootable floopy (or on servers a bootable partition just for it). It does full HD, floppy, CD, and memory scans. It will test the standard AT external ports (Parallel, Serial, PS/2) It runs VGA mode scans, and will test some features of the AGP port. Admittably it won't test stuff like sound cards, or many built-ins, but I doubt any Paid program would either.
To find it go to IBM support pages and start looking for Diagnostics, you will eventually find it.
I have found variations of the Hopi rain dance to be effective in solving many PC hardware problems. Tibetan chanting also work well.
an ill wind that blows no good
Hi, I recommend AIDA as a Sysinfo tool. Free and powerful, can even run in batch mode.
http://www.aida32.hu/aida32.php
Ziad
I definately agree that diagnosing computer problems is something can take years of experience and can become quite instinctual, part of that is having a good long-term memory and being able to put into memory the results of previous diagnostic work.
The other truth I wish to share is that you MUST under ALL circumstances get things a Salesperson says to you in WRITING before agreeing to purchase ANYTHING. I work as a Purchasing Agent primarily and I tell you what... Salespeople are often far worse then mythical Genies, they will twist everything you say and turn your own purchase orders against you if you don't have them worded just right and don't cover all the bases as well...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
www.ultimatebootcd.com
.::Dread
Free and includes loads of software.
sPh
memtest86 gives you a bootable floppy that will scan *all* RAM in a system, and turns up the most obscure memory errors. Some errors are not consistent, they only appear in transitions from one bit pattern to another, for example. Or adjacent bit cells may bias the bit in question.
That's all it does, but it's good. And it's free. One other point, systems with mismatched parts (designed for different bus speeds or timings), and overclocked systems, may generate memory errors. Since I started using memtest86, I've stopped overclocking, as every single overclocked system I've checked has shown errors under memtest86!
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
I use memtest86 quite a lot (well, sometimes we are all asked to "look at a computer", you know...). I think it's one _great_ piece of diag software. But I knew nothing about memtest86+! (I thought memtest86 got frozen). Quite informative for me - gonna try that home tonight.
I'm lead tech at a smallish computer shop. Over the years we've used just about everything to aid us in diagnosing hardware issues. The ones we use most are:
QuickTech Pro - This is great for testing memory, serial ports, video RAM, and just about every other problem that you can experience. In the past we've had so many problems with recieving bad RAM from our vendors that we now run the quick memory test from QuickTech on every PC before it leaves our shop.
OnTrack is simply the best when it comes to data recovery. They aren't cheap, but for a small-medium business their software is well worth the price. We've also purchased some of the MS Office add-ins to help us recover corrupted Word/Excel documents better. This program really works, and if it can't recover something off a failing drive (or something that a user deleted by accident) then Ontrack will almost certainly be able to recover the data at their facilities (for a steep price of course).
I'm not a huge fan of the guy that wrote SpinRite, but if you've got a FAT(16/32) partitioned drive that seems to be failing, this tool is great. It will recover bad sectors off most drives (not seagate), especially the ones that happen when Win9x doesn't get shut down properly due to a power surge or the like. This software is free and takes a very long time to run at its highest level.
Other than these 3 programs and a few other niche utilities we generally diagnose all other problems by having known good hardware and swapping out to see if the problem still exists. It is still, without a doubt, the best way to diagnose a hardware problem other than Technician's intiuition.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
I work for a mid sized county in Utah, and we are also using Qukck Tech Pro. it was a little on the pricy side, it was about $900 for the diag. software and a hardware pci post/test card, I believe that you can get the software alone for about $400, the test card rocks, it has all of their diagnostics software built on to the board, and a svga video connector so you can plug it in and power up your machine, with only the motherboard,cpu, and the diag card in the machine, (Yes it also has ram onboard) Very useful for finding crazy bugs on your hardware. Ultra-x also claims that they are used by Intel,AMD,.....etc in their test labratories.
These wonderful utilities are versatile, come in many sizes, and assure me that my @!$%@&! PC never, ever gives me an error message again!
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
That whole string of stuff you listed is almost completely software-based, while the posting asks about hardware. Besides Sandra and memtest86, you've got nothing there that would be of any use... Software problems are generally easier to solve since you can always format the disk and start over anyway.
Besides, is it legal to have a Win98 boot disk without having purchased Win98? I wouldn't think so, and this makes your $20 price tag inaccurate, especially since you're implying that you have other Windows boot disks as well.
Anytime you accept something with the option of returning it, get it in WRITING..
swerving back on topic: perhaps its time for a set of OSS tools for diagnostics.. some parts exist now, such as memtest86.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned CheckIt Diagnostics from Smith Micro Software (http://www.smithmicro.com). You will find it on their website listed under the Utilities section. CheckIt Diagnostics only costs $70. I bought my copy at a local computer store a few years ago.
What I like about it is that in the same box you get both a version that boots and runs from a single DOS boot floppy, as well as a Windows version on a CD ROM. I almost never use the Windows version because the DOS version is very comprehensive. The only complaint I have is that I can't find a way in the DOS version to make the diagnostics run "n" number of times. Their memory test is very thorough, but I'd like to leave the whole thing running for a few days. Maybe they've corrected that in newer versions?
They don't have an eval version on their web site, but maybe you can contact their sales department about getting one. Please note that they now have a product called CheckIt86 which has nothing to do with the DOS version (e.g. 8086) but is an ad-blocker.
Agreed: Try known good parts.
To prove to yourself that it really is fixed, use a memory tester, the hard disk manufacturer's disk diagnostics, and either a program that reboots an OS 20 seconds after it is loaded (on Windows XP, Wizmo from GRC.com and Sleep.exe from the resource kit) or, even better, some Linux or BSD build process that takes several hours.
The biggest cause of failure in an old PC: Bad contacts. Just move every card and connector 2 millimeters out and in again. The rubbing of metal to metal creates fresh contact surfaces. Renewing the contacts should be the first step in fixing any PC.
The biggest cause of real failure in a new PC: Infant failure. Components are more than 100 times more likely to fail in the first week than they are in the 100 weeks after that.
I use a combination of Memtest and Maxtor's Powerdiag software. Maxtor's software will work on any brand hard drive and has fixed quite a few non bootable hard drives long enough to get them Ghosted over to new drives. As for Micro2000, just last week I had a defective IDE controller that passed Micro2000's diagnostic tests just fine, but killed 2 hard drives. Micro2000's memory tests also miss a lot of errors that Memtest finds.
The reason I'vd found for this is quite simply that a piece of software can't possibly report correctly on a hardware problem, especially an intermittant one ( a klingon!). It's self defeating to expect software to find a problem with hardware. That's NOT to say that software testers don't have their place; they are great for burn-ins and torture tests.
I will most often have found and fixed a problem long before a diagnostic is ready to report. And if it is an extremely hard or intermittant problem, the diagnostics are not going to help anyway! I've found even harware-based diagnostics (you know those units that plug in to an ISA/EISA/PCI/whatever slot), to be ineffective as well; they work great when the hardware is fine, but fall over without a useful result when it's not. Think about it. As some others have said here, nothing beats the old noggin' as the best diagnostic software available (I guess we'd have to call it "wetware" though!).
Microsoft offers a freebie memory tester
Supposedly pretty good, it boots off a floppy or CD so it looks like it will run under Linux. I haven't had a chance to try it myself yet.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
I used to write diagnostic software for computer companies in the early 80s. If the computer was together enough to run my software there was not that much that could be wrong with it and very little I could find.
Keep in mind typical diagnostic sofware back then would test for things like memory not really being there (bad address or data line problem) or interrupts stuck on or not happening when they should or can't talk to the disk drive.
None of this crap really helps is you have a bad scsi cable (ouch, that was a long drawn out pig) or a bad cable or the wrong cache controller chip (ouch) or a bad power supply or wrong speed RAM any of which will cause a system to beheva erratically and in a - and this is the bad part - non repeatable way.
Back then almost every part was $8000, these days the answer to "how do I fix a flakey computer" is "buy a new one".
Need Mercedes parts ?
MemTestx86 (as you have found): Allow me one point further int he favor of it, major memory makers will accept their RAM bad, no questions asked (in my experience) if you tell them it was checked and found bad, via MemTextx86.
i'd like to second this. i had some crucial ram giving me trouble so i called their tech support folks, told them memtest86 failed, and they were quite satisfied. it turns out that our motherboard came with two different chipsets. the chipset we had was incompatable with the memory they sent and they crossshiped the replacement.
-- john
Sandra has some uses, but it, like a lot of other "hardware diagnostics" software, has a HUGE disadvantage.... It expects your operating system to be in good working order. It also expects that you have current (and appropriate) drivers installed for all your hardware. Any good technician already knows the tenet "Divide and conquer". When troubleshooting, you want to know if the problem is caused by the hardware or the software. If your software is screwed up, how can you trust the diagnostics to properly report that the HARDWARE is good?
Likewise, anyone can write a driver bad enough to make the video tests fail, but that doesn't mean the video card is actually defective.
Years ago, I worked at a PC manufacturer and we used QAPLUS FE. It was small enough to fit on a floppy disk, and had modules for all the independant subsystems: CPU, RAM, VIDEO, IO Ports, Timer channels, interrupts, Hard disk... You could select all the tests and let it run all night. If it failed on something, it actually gave you an idea on what might be the problem.
I would recommend QAPLUS if they had an up-to-date version that booted from a CD and had it's own KNOWN GOOD drivers for hardware. A Plus would be some sort of modular technology that would allow you to add drivers for more hardware in the future.
I it was Antec that recently put out a power supply tester. It basically an LED and a few resistors with a harness for like $15 or $25 (I forget). You still need a multimeter to test it but if you get you +/-12V and +/-5V while underload you should have a good power supply. I haven't personally used it yet but I plan to pick one up at some point.
If you come to a computer that needs work and you boot into a Knoppix CD you get...a desktop. On the other hand if you boot on to something like the ultimate boot cd you get a nice menu broken down by category of things like "File system utilities", "Memory Tests", and "Hard drive cloning". I just don't see how Knoppix can compare to that. I'm willing to listen though, if you care to explain what makes it so great for this.
SCO.com uses Linux
Hey folks,
It may seem too obvious to mention, but for ANY had drive issues, one of the first thigs I do is just use a bootable floppy with the manufacturer's diagnostic tools. Fujitsu, WD, Maxtor, they all have them and they have helped before. If the drive is failing, but still holding on, any bootable linux CD then goes in (Knoppix or Cool-Linux, ususally) and I copy the contents of the dying drive to a fresh one. Then the old one can continue its innevitable tranformation in to a paper weight.
Mr_Wood
If the diagnostic tool takes a few minutes to run, it generally is not as effective as my eyeball diagnostics of banging on the keyboard and testing out normal programs.
If the diagnostic tool is focused on specific tasks -- say memory or hard drive -- and it performs an exhaustive test, it will catch things I can't.
Case in point: I've found that 1/2 of my computers have had RAM defects; some right out of the box, and some toward the end of life.
Sometimes, I suspect that a specific problem exists and the tool verifies it. Other times, I test just to make sure the systems are OK, and get a surprise.
In either case, the tests should take hours. In one situation, I ran a burn-in test for over a day before any problems were detected.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Google for memtest86.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
I suggest you make a Knoppix CD with LTP installed. With a little configuration, that will take care of all of all your tests for the memory, disk, IO, and CPU. You might want to install America's Army or something to test the video subsystem.
If you put a little effort into it, you'll have a test suite as good as, and likely better than, anything you could pay money for. If you want to buy something, you can make a donation to the LTP and Knoppix projects.
There are also simpler tools, like Memtest86. I find this tool to be invaluable when I try to salvage old hardwar. I can't begin to tell you how much time it's saved me that I would have spent aimlessly swapping components around.
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
Just... listen...... to the screams......
You are looking for 1 package to diagnose a giant set of hardware components. That seems like quite a challange. Maybe you should look at it from the standpoint of components such as a memory test, hard drive test, mainboard test, proc test, etc.
This will obviously require you to lug someones hard-drive home to your "test" machine, but it may be easier looking for those kinds of software packages.
Good luck
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
There was this little mom and pop computer shop, where I bought some stuff, and my buddy bought a whole computer, circa 1993-94. My buddy paid $800 for 16 megs of RAM. And he paid $250 for a honking big tower case, with wheels, and hinged panels, and almost a dozen external bays.
That honking big case was a honking big mistake. He never populated those bays, and it was too bulky to carry on public transit. Well, I had a car, and he didn't. So, when he had hardware problems he would beg me for a lift.
I can't remember how many trips we made to this store. A bunch of them concerned his flaky hard drives. The fellow replaced the drive, at least once.
Well, one time my buddy asked me to take his computer to this store for him. And this time I watched the owner's diagnostic technique. The first thing he did was take the drive out of the big honking case, and put it in his test rig. He also confessed to me that he wasn't replacing the drives any more, he would just test it, and if it was okay he was telling my buddy he had replaced it.
When I got the computer back to my buddy's place, I opened it up myself. I found that one of the pins on one of the power connectors had come loose. So it was only making intermittent connection. And this was causing intermittent problems.
Diagnosis through swapping out components failed here.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Turn it on and see if it SMOKES. If it does its a hardware problem.
...Uniformity of hardware is key to maintaining a sane corporate IT infrastructure. If every department has their own standard, it's impossible to troubleshoot Gateways, IBMs, Dells, HPs, and frankenbeasts in an 8-hour day. x86 legacy aside, there are too many variations in quality and configuration even across "compatible" systems to reliably troubleshoot issues on a daily basis.
I especially like Dell and IBM's basic troubleshooting kits. They seem to be pretty decent at working on a variety of their own machines, so one disk will support the Dimensions, Optiplexes, and Latitudes I see on a daily basis.
For more in-depth toubleshooting, a good DOS boot disk with Partition Magic is a good first step. For Win2k machines, the System Rescue CD is vital. Especially when you need to bood from a CD (no floppy workstations), mount the NTFS partition, try to fix it, and if you fail you can mount a samba drive and backup your data all without multiple reboots.
I've worked as a technician for about five years, both on-site and in-house, and I really haven't found any good all-around utilities. Most of the diganostic programs mentioned here tend to test things that hardly ever test bad in reality, such as serial and parallel ports, timer chips, address lines, etc. The best thing to have around in case of a rather obvious failure (failure to power on, blank screen, beeping) is a collection of known good parts that can be swapped in to isolate the problem. They can also be useful in cases involving more subtle or intermittent problems, such as a CD burner that fails half the time or a computer that locks up after a few hours. Heat problems can be subtle -- I remember a friend telling me that the computer he shop didn't have heat for a while during the winter because of a bad relay, so there was a case where a computer with a slow fan worked at the shop, but didn't work when the customer took it back to their warm home. Sometimes a USB device a customer installed won't work because they plugged it in before installing drivers, and now it needs to be removed from the registry and installed again. In Windows, sometimes certain programs don't play well together, and experience will tell you what programs to avoid, and which processes in your task list don't belong. The point is, certain utilities may have their place, but no utility can replace the ability to diagnose a problem through experience and process of elimination. A memory test utility may show that you have bad memory, but experience may tell you that it's bad anyway, even when the program says it's okay. The good news is that I believe quality is improving again, after hitting a low in the K6-2 era, when cheap motherboard production proliferated, and the problem was compounded by the large increase in cooling needed for those chips (I'll never forget PC100 mainboards (yes, that was the company name, not the memory speed)). It's also pretty cheap nowadays to have spare parts on hand for quick checks.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
Prerequisites:
(1) GHOST'ed hard drive with Windows 2000 installed, and the Sysprep utility enabled on it
(4) Processors: a Socket 7, a Slot A, a Socket A, and a Socket 478
(4*2) RAM modules: a couple of 72 pin SIMM's, a couple of PC-66 SDRAM's, a couple of PC-133's, and a couple of DDR's
(3) Power supplies, an AT, an ATX, and one of those new ATX'es
(2) Motherboards, 1 AT, 1 ATX
(2) video cards, 1 PCI and 1 AGP
Step 1:
Replace user's HD with your SYSprep'd one. Boot. If you can boot, Win2K will do it's hardware detection routine. If it finishes, and boots to a 2K desktop, your problem is probably software and you have to narrow down from there. If it's using Windows, boot with user's hard drive in safe mode. If problem does not occur, disable taskbar lint under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Cur
Step 2:
If the user's machine did not go past the Win2K hardware detection routine, then the problem is hardware. Go into the PC's CMOS and reset to Setup Defaults. If that doesn't work, CMOS is OK, it's a hardware component. The list of problematic components in a typical PC, listed in desending order of probability is:
Go into the CMOS, disable L2 cache on the motherboard (common problem and you don't have to swap out anything). Try Win2K detection routine. If it works, motherboard L2 cache is the problem. If it doesn't, swap the ram. If it works, it's RAM. If it doesn't, swap the processor. If it works, it's chip. If it doesn't, swap the PSU. If it works, it's PSU. If it doesn't, take out all add-on cards and swap the video cards. If it works, swap back each add-on card one by one until the problem re-occurs. When it re-occurs, the last card you swapped back in was the problem. Replace it, and you are good to go.
Using this technique, I can troubleshoot 90% of PC's in 15 minutes or less, 90% of the time. HTH.
Right between your ears. Seriously, in the last 20+ years in this industry, there's one thing I've learned: if a diag detects a problem, you've got a problem, if it doesn't, you still might. Reason being, most hardware problems are intermittent. If the hardware doesn't work at all, then you know what the problem is and diags aren't going to tell you anything new (except for some arcane proprietary result code you need to tell the tech on the line when trying to get a replacement). If it's intermittent, it's tough to narrow it down, and diags might not catch it. If it's flaky, then the moment you run the diags is the time it doesn't act flaky.
:)
The best thing you can do is stop relying on useless diags. As you've learned, most are. Bone up on your troubleshooting skills, learn more about the hardware...
Do you know BIOS beep codes by heart? Do you know what they are? I've met very few people over the last few years who do. You don't need a POST card if you learn 'em.
Do you know how to write scripts? Batch files? A simple batch file that formats a drive, and fills it with data, over and over again will more often give you a good indicator as to its health than some diag.
These things are all based on "the basics" that every tech should know. Buy a copy of "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" and memorize it. There's a TON of good information on how these boxen work. If you fill your head with skills, you can always be sure to have the diags and information you need. If you need to rely too heavily on tools and such, you might not be in the right field.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
http://www.uxd.com/qtpro.shtml
Our company swears by it... every machine before it goes on the bench and after it leaves goes through fully automated and comprehensive "Burn-In" process. I'm not sure how much it costs, but its definitely up there around $400 maybe? and comes with bunch of loopback interfaces.
it's pretty up to date too, last version we have has serial ATA, athlon 64 etc support
I can't even count how much time we saved when after initial burn-in we realized that the memory was set to CAS 2.5 instead of 3 causing timer problems and subsequent weird application crashes.
A tool like this is very important if you have many crap machines coming from the street and you dont know who worked on them before (Joe Sixpack thought that lower CAS will make his computer go faster, but his el cheapo memory modules just wont take it)
A word of advice for do-it-yourself-ers: You get what you pay for. If you want a stable system, shell out the cash for a good quality power supply (Antec makes some nice upper-end quality power supplies in the range of a budget, check out tomshardware.com).
http://www.zhangduo.com/udi.html
unknown device identifier, it will give you the PnP info on your hardware, so youll know what sound card is in there *without* having to pop the case.
& its only 800k, so you can send it to someone & have them run it
[memtest86] Let me send you my IProc PC-100 SDRAM DIMM... the idiots put the wrong timing values in it's SPD. I've only found one machine, ever, to work properly with that damn thing. Tyan MB's tend to lock as soon as the POST is complete. Memtest86 ran for 7 days and could not find a problem with the DIMM.
Heheh... I've had similar problems with RAM speeds. A couple of years ago, a bunch of SiS shared video/system memory motherboards on FIDS (flight information display systems) that I was administering would cease to work when the displays were pushed to any resolution greater than 640x480.
The symptoms were random garbage and slow refresh of the screen - ie, close a window and artifacts remain. Kick to a shell and they all disappear as the resolution is cut to 640x480.
Took a look at the RAM itself. "PC100" stickers all over the place and 10ns speed ratings on the ICs. "Okay, f = 1/t and t=10ns, so this is 100 MHz rated RAM..."
Tried swapping in another DIMM. Same problem. Tried swapping in another DIMM of another brand - no more problem.
Did a little research when I noticed that the good DIMM had 7ns labels on all the ICs...
Turned out that the PC100 specification requires all the RAM chips to have 7ns or better response speeds... and apparently, the DIMMs which didn't work came from some third-world country where the definition of a nanosecond is somewhat different than ours. (Almost like how a "watt" in computer speakers and car stereos has absolutely nothing to do with the scientific definition. Rule of thumb: amplifiers rated in real watts will tend to weigh 1/4lb per watt. Haven't yet found a similar rule for memory speeds.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I work as a the production mananger for a midsized PC manaufacturer who also does a fair amount of refurbishing of other manufacturers sytems (30k plus units shipped in 2003) We have a need to inexpesively test hundreds of parts and units on a regular basis. The following are tools I can have any of my tech without.
0 &SiteID=simtel.net
The First is EBCD Emergency Boot CD
http://www.ebcd.i-am.ru/
Mirror of download http://www.simtel.net/product.php?id=61113&sekid=
This is a program that builds an ISO out of FD images and XML based build program so you can add all your floppy based boot tools to it or use the multitude of built in tools including Memtest HD fitness utility and AIDA 16
Another excellent choice is to use Ultimate Boot Cd available at http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ all make use of freeware and shareware.
also as mentioned yesterday a WinPE disk made using Bart's PE builder is excellent for windows testing.
No, seriously, the best non-synthetic test of a system's datapath IMHO is to build the Linux kernel repeatedly. GCC is quite RAM and disk intensive, and so stresses the most flakiness-prone parts of a machine. Plus it gets the CPU pretty hot. This, in my experience, will make a machine with marginal memory, clock settings, or even heat dissipation fall over.
It's why I don't support end-users anymore. $349 gets you a brand new Dell. Fixing PC's is becoming pointless. I haven't fixed anything except a dead hard drive in years. SO have them spend $349 and charge them $75 to add their old HD as a slave and reinstall their software and recustomize. You'll make more money with less work. I promise.
Vote Quimby!
I have had success with Checkit Utilities from Smith Micro. Note that I just use it when I have problems with my own machines so I cannot claim to be a power user and so cannot speak for how complete the testing suite is. They will boot from a floppy, which is essential for doing hardware diagnostics - you cannot do that from inside Windows.
Squirrel!
It is a shame that most PC technicians don't actually diagnose problems. Instead, they guess and swap, until the system happens to work, again. They don't really know what was wrong (though they probably will claim otherwise), and they certainly don't know if they fixed the problem.
I've met several technicians who claim that modern microchips are less-sensitive to electrostatic discharge than obsolete microchips were, but the microchip industry says exactly the opposite. Most PC technicians take very little, if any, precaution against electrostatic discharge. They assume that if the component works, it isn't damaged, and they lack the skills and tools to find any real damage. Instead, they simply swap out parts if something stops working.
I can't entirely fault the PC troubleshooting industry, though. Electronics are too cheap, most of the time, for technicians to spend very much time troubleshooting them. Speed is the most important asset in the PC industry. It is better to be fast than correct, whether troubleshooting systems or writing software code or technical manuals.
That might be reasonable for PC technicians, but one could find the same attitude in other troubleshooting industries. I just took my car in for repairs, because I often had to push-start it. This after a week of repairs for various problems. In that week, the mechanics never found anything wrong with my car starting, and this last trip dedicated to that problem was no different... until the mechanics got ready to return my vehicle to me. When they tried to drive back to the parking lot, my vehicle would not start. A new starter appears to have taken care of that problem.
Doctors are the same way. It costs far too much to find the real problem, I suppose, so doctors rely on rules-of-thumb and shotgun approaches. Many diagnosis are through the process of elimination; one treatment didn't work, so they try another. Doctors probably never know exactly what is wrong with the patient, but they often get close enough for the body to heal itself, to some degree.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)