Question : Problem: Hardware diagnostic tools

Hi,

I am looking for a good hardware diagnostic program for PCs running Windows 95, 98 and 2000.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Kryptix

Answer : Problem: Hardware diagnostic tools

Don't rely on one, find about 5 to keep on hand, even if you just intend to use one all the time, there will be times when it tells you things you don't beleive, and there will be times when it is plain wrong, Sandra's recommendations need to be taken with a pinch of salt sometimes. Also some diagnostics are pretty pointless, they seem to check a lot, but when you get down to it, half of the stuff they do is reported by the bios, another few things should be darn obvious, and the remaining tests aren't very thorough. What is a good idea is to get yourself a collection of diagnostics that just test one thing but test it very well. i.e. a MMX instruction tester, a cache tester, a memory tester ...........

Beware of diagnostics under any windows OS, a lot will tell you what windows beleives things are set as, often a diagnostic has to get under the OS to tell you anything useful, like for checking out serial ports well. Diagnostics that work in DOS are generally more reliable for me, you can put them on dos boot disks and set them up to autorun usually. Windows diagnostics have their place, they are good for troubleshooting windows configuration issues and driver problems, but for low level hardware checks they often fall short.

I use AMIdiag/Norton Diagnostics/Snooper/PCinfo/MSD(it has it's uses)/Sandra/Wintune and also the benchmarks in Norton Sysinfo, 3dbench, Wintach. (benchmarks often help you track down configuration issues)

You can get an AMIdiag demo from..
http://www.ami.com/utilities/download/Diagdemo.exe
Sandra has been posted, Wintach is hard to find these days, Snooper is available from the Simtel MSDOS collection, not sure where PCinfo came from, Norton Diagnostics you have to pay for as part of the Norton Utilities suite and MSD comes with DOS 6-6.22 and some versions of windows. Wintune can be used online (!?) here or downloaded...
http://wintune.winmag.com/

regards,

Road Warrior