Quote:
Originally Posted by Nehkara
Sorry Rathji, Hack&Lube. Thanks for your replies, I did a pretty poor job of making myself understood in the OP.
Basically the computer is old and I was curious if there is an application that could evaluate how well the hardware is operating. For example, if there are bad sectors on the hard drive, errors in memory, or a faulty video card (which I already suspect).
Thanks for trying to help!
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Sorry, again the answer is not really. Fixing computers is a lot of looking at symptoms and guessing at what's wrong. Many times, there's no real way to see directly what is wrong without guesswork on your part. There's no universal app that can do these things. You basically have to stress each component and see if it fails basically.
For the harddrive, a much easier way than downloading a 3rd party or OEM app is to goto My Computer and goto the properties of the drive. Then goto tools and select Error Checking. Check off both options and let it go. You may be required to schedule the chkdsk on next boot if it is your primary C: as Windows will have files in use. This may take up to an hour. This is the same as running chkdsk /r on the drive and usually will take care of the majority of harddrive problems.
Memtest is pretty complicated for the average user.
I would read up on it first. Select the right test for your situation and let it go. Optimally, you will also be required to install Memtest on a bootable CD/floppy/flashdrive, etc. and boot from it instead of your normal harddrive (check boot order in bios). It may take many passes over several hours to determine if there are memory errors.
For the videocard, you will want to run a stability benchmark by stressing it out. Download
Furmark or 3Dmark. What you will be looking for is your system locking up or graphical artifacts appearing. Usually this will look like corruption such as squares or flashing white dots.
For the overall system, the best tool for seeing if the CPU and RAM are stable together is
Prime95. Select the smallFTT test to stress your CPU only. Select the blend test to test the CPU + RAM. This can be a good thing to run before memtest. Many people will run Prime95 for several hours to make sure the system is stable and the worker threads don't crash or the system doesn't lock up entirely.
If you have specific symptoms or problems with your computer that you can describe, it might be best to ask about them directly here instead of having to run hours of tests yourself.