On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 3:41 PM, Roger Heflin <rogerheflin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Robin Laing wrote:
>
> max bianco wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 11:47 AM, Tim <ignored_mailbox(a)yahoo.com.au>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 00:08 +1000, David Timms wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Yes, and shoot it with the heat gun and so on. But is there some
>>>> software designed to do stress testing ?
>>>
>>> I've often asked something similar from PC shops, as their testing
>>> seemed to comprise of just seeing if it'll boot and stay running for
>>> half an hour...
>>>
>> Yes, people do not realize how hard it is to pinpoint a hardware
>> problem. Many are under the impression there is some magic involved
>> and results should be instant and/or provide instant "Star Trek" style
>> solutions. We are not quite there yet , especially as far down the
>> totem pole as your average pc repair shop. I try to use the computer
>> as much as possible but time is money and you can easily run up a bill
>> that exceeds the cost of a cheap machine quite quickly. However if you
>> feel you have a genuine hardware problem then I would do the
>> following. The order will vary depending on where you think, based on
>> your observations, the problem lies.
>>
>>
>
> SNIP.
>
>
>>
>> All comments, criticisms, questions, pointing out of incorrect info
>> welcome and appreciated.
>>
>>
>> Max
>>
>
> Very good points.
>
> Back in the 386/486 days, I had an ISA board that would run a bunch of
> hardware and software tests to check the hardware. Not perfect but sure
> helped.
>
> A good digital volt meter to measure the voltage rails. A power supply
> that is close to being out of limits could drift enough to cause the
> computer to freeze at strange times. The BIOS voltage readings are not
> always that accurate.
>
> Also, when cleaning out the dust. Make sure that you know where all the
> jumper settings are on the motherboard. Cost me many hours when one of the
> jumper shorting connectors came off on my computer.
>
> Also confirm that the latest BIOS is installed. Even on new motherboards.
> This fixed a freezing issue on a new computer for me. Worked okay with 4Gig
> of ram but not 8 gig. Memtest worked great.
>
Compiling up something called HPL (with something called MPI) at least does
nicely at finding that you have a memory/overheat/internal CPU issue. If
the results corrupt or the machine crashes something is really wrong,
typically it won't tell you what is wrong, but if it successfully runs for a
long time then you can expect most things to be correct. Generally it
will at least crash the machine several times faster than most other
applications.
It won't find IO/PCI/Video issues unless they are really severe, though
generally most of the issues fall into what it does test.
Do you happen to know what the latest version is? I have turned up a
version 1.0a dated Jan 20, 2004. Do you know if that is the latest
version available.
Max