On 10 Feb 98 at 22:31, Jim Chapman wrote:

> I have a 200mhz MMX Pentium from Gateway. I am running Windows 95 and IE4.
>   I need modern hardware diagnostics.  I heared that there were some
> undocumented diagnostics in Win95, but I was not able to find them.  I was
> not able to find them at microsoft online support search.  Perhaps their
> search engine is no good.  I would prefer freebies, but would settle for
> economy class.

  I've had past good experiences with CheckIt/WinCheckIt, and if I
can confirm that their new version will work with my (home) Cyrix
6x86 CPUs, I'll buy it again.  [You shouldn't have any such trouble.]
I think it's aroud $50-60; it's aimed more at consumers than at
technicians.

  Most strictly DOS-based diagnostics are simply overwhelmed by more
than 16MB of memory, more than two digits of CPU speed, 3D graphics
acceleration adaptors and dual CPUs.  Many Windows-based "system
information" programs just report what the OS tells them.  I've found
*one* package that SEEMS[*] to have the oomph to be useful on our
(work) dual-PII 256MB NT servers, and that's ForeFront's "The
TroubleShooter" -- and it's $300.

[*]  We have not yet had a failure where it played a critical
diagnostic role, so I've only run it on systems that seemed to run
everything else just fine.  It *does* clearly do more than the
several <$100 utilities we tried.

David G


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