Looking feedback on diagnostic hardware and software

[steveblue]

Hello all,

I'm looking feedback for good hardware and software diagnostic gear, what do you use? , anyone know what gear PCpro uses?

I've had a search on google but to be honest most sites I've come across havent been the most professional to say the least, so any website address are welcome

Thanks

[Guest]

The gear you use would depend on what you're testing, and what you're testing for.

If you're trying to determine the faulty component in a recently running system then nothing beats a large bin of "known good" spare parts to swap out: power supplies, CPUs, memory sticks, and motherboards.

If you're evaluating new PCs for reliability then you'll want the appropriate "burn in" software to test the components critical to the operations you're likely to run every day.

If you're evaluating individual components for public review then it's necessary to know the components you're testing intimately: how it's supposed to be built, build and performance flaws common to the hardware, how it should act under certain conditions, etc. HardOCP is good about fully disclosing how they test the hardware they review, from video cards to power supplies.

[steveblue]

looking more for motherboard diagnostic gear, esp for motherboards with built in features that cant be swapped out

[VideoRipper]

The best gear you can't be without is plain simple common sense and (a lot of)

background knowledge of (computer) electronics.

My estimate is that between 60%-80% of the faults in a PC can be found with

only a screwdriver and some cross-check swap parts.

Greetz,

Peter.

Edited July 2, 2010 by VideoRipper

[puntoMX]

looking more for motherboard diagnostic gear, esp for motherboards with built in features that cant be swapped out

Yes okay, but when you have a dead motherboard you need to know how to look into micro-electronics, and as more than half of your components are semi-conductors, you will need a lot of professional tools and knowledge to hunt the defect down, note that people go to school for 4 years to learn such a profession.

So, most of us just swap out parts with the screwdriver like VideoRipper said. It's also no use to find a problem on a motherboard that is 3 years old that will cost you 5 hours to fix with 10k Euro at least of tools (If you build the tools your self you could save there). Before you had those Serial and parallel port testers for example, but on modern motherboards you will not even find any low-level I/O like that any more.