Pc-Check Reviewed
- Overclocked Cafe (March 2001) - 1 | 2 | 3

Pc-Check: The Goods

When you open the package, you see a diskette, a manual, and loopback adapters for your parallel and serial ports. The manual is well done, giving you the step by step directions you need if you are the type to read the manual. If you aren't, you'll have to rely on your experience and the interface.

The good news is that the interface is easy to use. Make a copy of the master diskette. All you have to do then is boot from the disk, and you are off. I was going to include some screen pictures, but I'm still playing with my new digital camera setup, and the pictures I've taken were not of a quality that I'd want to display here. It is no great loss, because the text only interface is simply and well laid out. You shouldn't have any trouble finding what your way around. I personally prefer an - type of interface, but the basic text menu interface presented by PC-Check posed no problems to me. It uses the same blue background that I seem to recall from the bygone days of my youth.

When you first run PC-Check, you are presented with several diverse options. You can immediately dive in and start running diagnostics in an interactive fashion, or you can select tests to run in a 'burn in mode'. The latter can actually be quite useful when one is burning in a newly built system. Let's take a look at what kinds of information and tests are available.

What do you have?

The first section is the System Information menu. From here you get a wealth of information about your PC. There is the standard system configuration information, with processor type and speed, amount of RAM installed, and more. Drilling down into the SMBIOS information, you can find the software interrupt vectors, the IRQ's for each hardware device, information about the system timer and clock, I/O port information, and more.

In every test that I gave it, PC-Check correctly identified the basic hardware. One thing that is a problem though is software modems. These devices, sometimes called 'Winmodems' because they are usually supported only on various flavors of Windows, are very simple, usually single chip solutions that rely on their host CPU (i.e. the same one YOU are relying on) to do most of the work. I won't turn this into a rant about Winmodems, I'll save that for a future column. Suffice it to say that PC-Check will not identify the type of modem, nor will it be able to test it.

PC-Check will otherwise do a fine job of delineating your hardware, including PCI and possibly PCMCIA devices. The latter are only detected if you have the appropriate card and socket services drivers loaded You can also query your drive types, poke around in your CMOS memory, or in fact anywhere in your RAM space as well. I used to spend hours poking around in memory, dissassembling DOS and BIOS instructions to see what made my PC tick. Ah, the memories.

Is it functioning?

The advanced diagnostic functions are quite impressive, although they could use some improvements. The processor test, for example, includes tests of the MMX core, but not of SSE, 3DNow!, or SSE2. As SIMD instructions become increasingly common in software, it is important to test these aspects of the core as well. However, that is a minor quip. I was actually pleased to see separate MMX tests, let along SSE and the rest. Hopefully they will be included in future releases.

For the most part, the tests are very complete and exhaustive. The memory and hard drive scans are quite thorough. In the case of the former, there are many different tests that are done, using different modes of operation to access memory. Don't sit and stare at it while it's running, it can take quite some time to run all of the memory tests. If you wish, you can specify a range of addresses to check. In practice, however, you will seldom know where to look for a potential problem, so testing your entire RAM subsystem is a good idea when troubleshooting. Cache memory can also be tested for faults.

The hard drive module not only allows standard testing, but also can view partition tables, test your drive subsystem for the optimal interleave, and perform low level reformatting of your hard drive. Please do not play with the latter option unless you know what you are doing. Floppy disk and DVD/CD-ROM drives can also be thoroughly checked.

Input/Output systems such as serial and parallel ports, as well as hardware modems, can also be put through exhaustive testing. The included loopback adapters let you test serial and parallel ports without having devices on each end. Analog joysticks can also be tested. One other deficiency is the lack of support for PCI soundcards. The software would not even recognize my SBLive!, and apparently only works with older ISA based soundcards. There is also a host of video card testing. The various tests cover multiple text modes, as well as many VESA standard SVGA modes. Advanced features of specific accelerators (i.e. Nvidia, 3dfx, ATI, etc.) are not supported, as this is a PC diagnostic program, not a video card testing suite. Sticking to standard modes is a good idea in this kind of software. There are a lot more odds and ends. Printer testing is included, although you won't be able to print to software driven printers like some low end deskjets. Rest assured, you will get a ton of good information from this software.

All in all, the testing is complete and accurate. The reports can be saved to disk or printed directly, and are good documentation to have if you are supporting customers, or even if you are documenting tests of your system(s) at home.