Invitation to rant and rave…
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning” – Bill Gates.
Do you have a story to tell? Is there a feature you would love to see included in our products or removed?
What are your personal testing experiences, and how have our products helped or hindered you. We want to know.
Please feel free to contribute your personal testing views, ideas and stories into the Euosoft BlogIt Open-Floor by leaving a comment below.
Within QA+Win the feature I am missing right now exists in one capacity but is not implemented the way I want. What I would like is for me to be able to script a specific test to start and run and then when it gets to the Pass/Fail screen, STAY OPEN and don’t auto-close after a tech acknowledges the prompt. They still need to see what component fails so to auto-close the test is counterintuitive.
If a test script is manually loaded the pass/fail dialog just closes and then you can see the pass/fail results. This makes far more logical sense.
Specific to QA+Win, test results are viewable after the notification is presented and acknowledged, by editing the configuration file and setting QA+Win to output a report. Read more in the Advanced User Guide found in \Interface\help of the QA+Win directory or contact Technical Support directly for more details.
As for what I’d like to see for the next versions of PC-Check:
The obvious one (UEFI booting) is supposed to ‘be in the works.’ A timeline on this would be appreciated; we’re running into UEFI systems that can’t be set to legacy boot. It’s rather inconvenient to have to pull a hard drive to test it in another system.
The one major gripe that I have is when using PC-Check with USB drives. PC-Check starts to test all hard drives, but it counts the USB as a hard drive (Drive 1) and starts with that. I looked through the documentation for test scripts and command-line options, but didn’t see anything that would allow me to only test drives 2 through 4 (the actual hard drives). This means we have to baby-sit it, somewhat nullifying its test-scripting features.
Some reliable SSD testing would also be in order.
While I realize it’d be almost impossible to pull off in a DOS-type environment, a way to test integrated webcams would be lovely.
Thanks for listening!
Matt Williston
(for Phil Schindler, Device Pitstop Phoenix)
Customer blog input has led us to remind Pc-Check users that, reliable SSD testing was covered in an earlier news bulletin that everyone is welcome to review and sign up for more news you can read it here. Additionally, USB controllers are already tested, which is where many devices such as cameras are attached to. For further USB device testing, QA+Win utilising Windows drivers allows certain peripheral testing as the OS dictates. This previous news bulletin details how to avoid testing the USB as a hard drive.
UEFI is topical and problematic worldwide, gaining momentum because not all hardware is compliant or compatible within the UEFI standard. Do we dare say that it’s still a “shell game” whether you can still use legacy boot. At Eurosoft, the Pc-Check UEFI diagnostics are emerging, with progress impeded only by the intricate development of proprietary drivers to cover the short comings of available drivers from component manufacturers. A glimpse of the pre-release is envisioned for Q2 2016. In the meantime, using QA+Win for 64Bit and UEFI hardware is our standard recommendation. By using Microsoft WinPE with QA+Win, less resources are used and boot time is shortened. Eurosoft QA+Win customers get an application note to ensure the best way to work with WinPE and UEFI conditions, “Building a WinPE boot solution for Eurosoft QAWIN”.
We purchased a copy of PC-Check 7.04 a few years ago. My one and only reason for not continuing to use & upgrade this is the USB license key. In my experience it’s another case of hindering legitimate customers more than the pirates. We were at the time using HP desktops & laptops, and the key often wouldn’t be detected by PC-Check making it unusable. Even if it did work every time however, I’d be reluctant to leave it sticking out of a PC that I was not sat in front of, as it probably would “disappear” by the time I came back.
Floating network license, some kind of disposable/time limited license file on a standard flash drive, or plain old trusting your customers would all be better options in my opinion.
Steven Pc-Check now only requires activation codes which are supplied when the product is registered. The activation code only needs to be entered the first time you create a personalised Pc-Check CD/USB. The USB license key is no longer a requirement.