What diagnostic tools do you use?

**evilsatan** · 18th June 2010

I am hopefully going to condense the contents of this thread and make a sticky for anyone trying to diagnose issues on their PC.

The main diagnostic tests would be for memory and HDD to rule them out. Personally I have always used memtest for memory testing and Spinrite or Seatools for HDD testing, Speedfan for core temp monitoring, and a Microsoft boot CD for minidump analysis. I just google and microsoft support/technet search BSOD codes. I have several apps for password recovery/removal/skip like Kon-Boot, PC Login Now, and some discs I got when working alongside the Sony repair team.

Hirens bootCD is always on hand just in case.

What methods and software does everyone else use for diagnosis?

**BertRoot** · 18th June 2010

My wits is all.

**Over Carl** · 18th June 2010

Another vote for memtest, seatools and speedfan.

What's the script with the boot cd to anaylse minidumps - I normally use WinDbg from the windows debugging tools?

Also one to add to the list - prime95 (x86 and x64) - seriously hammers cpu or can be tweaked to hammmer chipset/ram, although I only use this for cpu testing.

Also at work all our desktops are dell's. I used to wipe the recovery partition, but my new images have it back on and updated from dell's website - it's helped me out a few times when I haven't had my diag tools with me.

**plug1** · 18th June 2010

you can by a cheap pci card from dx that will report most boot problems

**evilsatan** · 18th June 2010

My M$ disc for minidumps is part of the MSDart toolset, you boot to it as if you were reinstalling windows and there is an additional menu.

**Over Carl** · 21st June 2010

Anyone got anything good for dodgy gfx cards?

I had a pc where I knew the gfx card was screwed - the minidumps all pointed to nvidia drivers, pc wouldn't boot. Changed card for an identical one and the pc was sorted.

However, got the card back to base and put in another identical pc with same image to recreate the fault and it's bluescreened 3 times but the dumps are all pointing to random crap, but the pc was solid before the card went in. Tried using prime95 to hammer cpu/memory/chipset and all look solid - just wondering if anyone knows of any good utilities to make the gfx card keep falling over.

**evilsatan** · 21st June 2010

The QC department when I worked for Toshiba used something called burnintest:
http://www.passmark.com/products/bit.htm

You can select which tests to run and it will put load on those components. It's not great software but it was used for general testing of all components. You can select how long to run the tests and what load to put on which components.