diagnostics sofware -- where can i get ???

  • Thread starter Thread starter Beowulf
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Beowulf

Just bought a laptop, need diagnostics software to check for bad RAM, etc.
Can anybody help me out with where to get freeware/shareware for doing an
exhaustive check of my laptop memory, drives, etc.? The shipping carton
was crushed in on one corner so naturally I am worried that the box fell
off the loading dock and I want to make sure the laptop computer was not
damaged in some way that may not be obvious just by booting it, etc. Thank
you in advance for any help!
~Randall
 
Beowulf said:
Just bought a laptop, need diagnostics software to check
for bad RAM, etc. Can anybody help me out with where to get
freeware/shareware for doing an exhaustive check of my laptop
memory, drives, etc.? The shipping carton was crushed in on
one corner
Click to expand...

For the memory, I would run all three of these:

www.memtest86.com
www.goldmemory.cz
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

The first two received very good reviews from www.realworldtech.com,
which tested several diagnostics, including some very expensive ones
and some based on hardware, and Gold Memory was one of the few that
found defects missed by MemTest86. I like Gold Memory because it's
faster (about 20 mins for 256M PC2100) than MemTest86, and I used to
think that it would find any defect that MemTest86 did, but a few
months ago I bought a Kingston ValueRAM PC2100 that passed Gold Memory
every time but consistently failed MemTest86.

The third diagnostic is Microsoft's own, and one person reported that
it found errors that both Gold Memory and MemTest86 missed.

In my experience if memory fails any diagnostic, you will eventually
experience problems with it under Windows, but you may have to test
for several hours because some errors are so marginal that they don't
show up on every pass (I once had one that took 4-5 hours to show up
with MemTest86, but it always did). OTOH DocMem, a free diagnostic
given out by www.simmtester.com, is so bad that it's not worth using
at all (RealWorldTech gave it a bad review), and it's never found an
error for me that any of the other programs missed.

For hard drive testing, it would be best to use the HD manufacturer's
own diagnostic, which is usually free, but if it's not available try
Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (DFT), downloadable from www.hgst.com,
because it can do read and S.M.A.R.T. testing on any brand of HD. I
believe that any of these can test more thoroughly than ScanDisk or
generic diagnostics.
 
IF they had those styrofoam pieces in each corner of the machine and these
were not crushed then there should be no damage.
 
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