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Software To Diagnose Faulty PC Hardware?
Etylowy writes "Over the years I have repaired my own PC and those belonging to family and friends many, many times. While in most cases it turned out to be restoring a system after malware/the user/Windows made a mess, or simple cases of 'follow the smell of smoke and molten plastic,' there were some nasty ones where the computer mostly works. By 'mostly,' I mean: you can boot it up, it might even work for a while, but will crash way too often to blame it all on Microsoft — what do you do then? Once you strip it of any extra hardware (which, with today's motherboards that have pretty much everything integrated, might not be an option) you are left with the CPU, motherboard, graphics card, RAM and HDD. You can test the HDD, you can run memtest86+ to check the RAM, but how do you go about testing the CPU, motherboard and graphics card trio to find which is to blame? Replacing them one by one isn't really an option. Do you know of any software that would help the way memtest helps with RAM?"
No, it's just that i've given up on trying to solve issues that are utterly impossible to figure out, because you're basically just guessing what the issue could be, based on your experience.
In my job, i've learned that this does not pay - fixing an out-of-warranty machine for 185 CHF per hour is _not_ something a customer will pay for - replacing the machine is cheaper and gets you a new one with 3 years of warranty.
Of course there are still friends and family, but i've stopped building machines for them from parts since i've got out of my apprenticeship. They'll expect instant and free support for every issue they have, so my recommendation is usually to get a machine from a local shop where they can annoy someone else.
The same goes for many software issues - sure, if i have a strange issue on one of my machines, i'll usually spend a few hours on trying to resolve, just to satisfy my curiosity. The same also goes for servers at work.
But if i have a non-reproducible problem on a client machine, replacing it with a swap machine and a fresh OS image immediately fixes the users issue and costs less money.
Add to that that a lot of hardware has been replaced by laptops, where you can do very little in case of issues, since replacement parts are fuck expensive and maintenance manuals sometimes hard to come by, depending on the manufacturer.
Also, most of the client machines at work consist of very few components, and fixing out of warranty machines makes little sense - a new ThinkCentre M58 costs around 1000$ - getting a replacement mainboard for an old A51 or such costs around 200$, plus labour, and if you're unlucky the problem wasn't the board but the psu, cpu or memory, and you'll need to order more parts and invest more work.
But hey, maybe i'm just to negative about this. Maybe you can enlighten me how you can sort out these issues.