good diagnostic tools

[adrianlewis]

Does anyone know of any good diagnostic tools that can also help suggest solutions for problems? I have tried things like FreshDiagnose but no suggested solutions are given.

[TwoRails]

Hi adrianlewis. You might get better responses if you give more details! Solutions to what kind of problems? Have you tried Sandra yet?

TwoRails

[adrianlewis]

I havent tried Sandra yet? where can I find that.

I have a lot of friends who ask me to try to solve the problems their pcs have such as error messages (unhandled exceptions etc.) and the computer running slow. Usually I try to run the computer for 30 mins and browse the computer and I run a virus scan and advice them to run scandisk and defrag more often. Also I do a check for spyware. Some cases this proves useful and things do improve but It takes quite some time to find the solution. Other cases I don't find the problem and am left wondering if I could have done more or if it is a hardware problem that I am not aware of. I wanted to hopefully find various software that could hopefully test the system and diagnose any faults or room for improvment and give the appropriate solution for this.

Thanks for your reply.

Adrian

[setfree]

Try Norton Utilities. It is a collection of about 15 Norton programs that can check everything from physical problems with your hard drive, to your registry, to problems in windows.

[adrianlewis]

I had a quick look at norton... looks good but you need to install it. I was hoping to find a program which could run off a cd or similar...

Anymore ideas.

Thanks for your help.

Adrian

[setfree]

Most of the Norton programs can be run off of the cd. Not sure exactly which ones though.

[Cricket]

Actually, I think the best "diagnostic tool" is your own eyes, the internet and a good search engine (like Google). You can type the error message (if you're getting one) into Google or the MS Knowledge Base and usually get an answer to the problem. And you can visit the forums like this one and post the problem...someone here will more than likely have the solution to the problem or point you in the right direction to find a solution.

What I do use are RAM and hard drive diagnostic utilities, a DOS antivirus program (FProt) and spyware and trojan scanners to help track down problems. I don't use any of those diagnostic utility packages (like Norton's or McAfee's) anymore as they just clutter the hard drive, can reduce system performance and they don't always diagnose the problem correctly.

And I have lots of spare parts to swap in to test with if to see if it's a hardware related problem.

Cricket

[adrianlewis]

Thanks for the help.

can you recomend any good ram and hard drive diagnostic tools that a free or fairly cheap to get (low budget at the mo).

Also why is it more useful to use a dos based virus scanner rather than a windows based scanner?

[TwoRails]

Most HD manufactures offer free diagnostic utilities on their Web sites.

DocMemory, also free and considered one of the best memory checkers, can be found at: www.simmtester.com

HTH

TwoRails

[Cricket]

Originally posted by adrianlewis can you recomend any good ram and hard drive diagnostic tools that a free or fairly cheap to get (low budget at the mo).

DocMemory from Simmtester is a free RAM tester.

All hard drive manufacturers provide a hard drive diagnostic utility free for download from their website.

Originally posted by adrianlewis Also why is it more useful to use a dos based virus scanner rather than a windows based scanner?

Because it can fit on a bootable floppy disk which you can use to scan your system from DOS instead of loading up Windows. Sometimes the virus infection can be so bad that Windows is just too messed up to run. And it's better to fix Windows system files from DOS since they aren't in use. FDisk is a good free DOS based antivirus and it can be run from floppy disks. Here are the instructions for putting FProt on 3 floppies.

Cricket