| |
Pc-Check
Reviewed
- Overclocked Cafe (March 2001) -
1 | 2
| 3
Pc-Check:
Case Study and Conclusions
Some Small
Case Studies:
I decided
to test the software in a real environment.
I dug up a machine at work that I knew
suffered from spurious GPF's (General
Protection Faults) that I suspected to
be caused by a hardware problem. I ran
the full suite of tests, only to find
that all of the memory tests would fail
at an address corresponding to one of
the SIMM's (yes, SIMM's, this was an old
Pentium 166MMX). I yanked the offending
memory and replaced it. The problem disappeared.
This seemed
too easy, so I next installed a hard drive
that I knew had a few bad sectors. PC-Check
detected them flawlessly, marking them
as unusable. I ran the software on a few
more random machines, finding no problems.
I finally decided that it was doing its
job as advertised, and stopped trying
to find situations where it would fail.
That isn't to say that there aren't any.
In fact, I'd be surprised if there weren't.
Rest assured, however, that they will
be quite rare. In general, you should
be able to pick up common system problems.
I also ran the burn in module on two machines
at home, a newer Pentium III 866 and a
Pentium II 333. I did not find any problems.
However, when overclocking the 333 to
415 (83.5mhz FSB), the MMX test would
fail, and at times the hard drive test
would hang the system, but with no data
loss. Seems like I need some better cooling
for the processor, and perhaps a chipset
cooler for the motherboard to try and
circumvent the disturbing IDE problem.
In all the time that I overclocked that
particular box, thankfully, I never experienced
data corruption of any kind.
Conclusions
Taken as a whole, this is a powerful diagnostic
tool. I would have no problem with recommending
it to any technical support person or
hardware hobbyist. Here are some of the
pros and cons.
Pc-Check
is a great tool, as long as your expectations
are set appropriately. No one tool is
perfect, but as diagnostic software goes,
this ranks near the top of the heap.
|
|
