Computer is an essential thing for Businesses but it is as important to the home users as well. In short, we can say that Computers become the necessity of our daily life, Though smartphones are trying to replace computers, but still computers are equally important. And computer errors and problems are also very common. Troubleshooting or repairing a computer is not always easy task for technicians. To diagnose an issue properly first of all we need to gather the system information. After getting the detailed information we can diagnose any issue in less time. This is very helpful specially in hardware and drivers related issues. These tools are useful for Onsite technicians as well as for Remote computer technicians.
Best technicians tools to diagnose a computer
- I am looking for the best mac diagnostic tools to check memory, hd, video, ect. Any links or suggestions will be appreciated.
- My Mac diagnostic tool belt. I keep a special folder of Mac OS X diagnostic and repair applications on my Mac's hard drive in case of emergency and there are a couple tools that every self.
- I did a search on the App Store for iPhone diagnostic tool After doing a general search on the App Store for a Diagnostic Tool for the iPhone this app appeared. After downloading it was painfully apparent this app is not a Diagnostic Tool for the iPhone. It’s extremely aggravating when you do a search in the wrong information is given.
Below are some tools which technicians use to troubleshoot the windows PC. These tools are useful in diagnosing a PC to find out the exact issue.
1. Process Explorer
The best Mac disk repair diagnostic tools & more! As Macs continue to gain market share, there is an increased likelihood that you will have to support them if you are a tech.
Process Explorer is a small utility available for free. It can help to find out the files and directory opened by a program. If you need information that what file or folder is using a process then this tool is very helpful. It is useful to track the DLL version problems or handle leaks.
Download:ProcessExplorer.zip
How to run: Unzip the ProcessExplorer.zip file and then run procexp.exe file from the extracted folder to start the ProcessExplorer.
2. Windows Sysinternals Suite
Sysinternals suite is collection of diagnostic and troubleshooting utilities provided by Microsoft for Free. So it includes all the utilities which can help to troubleshoot a PC. Process explorer and other useful tools like Autoruns, PsTools, desktops etc are bundled with this.
Download:SysinternalsSuite.zip
How to run: Unzip the SysinternalsSuite.zip file and then run autorun.exe file from the extracted folder to start the Sysinternals Suite.
3. System Explorer
It is also a free software tool to get the detailed system information. It is an award-winning software which can explore the internal system and processes running on the computer.
Download:SystemExplorerSetup.exe
Main Features:
- Get details about tasks, processes services, drivers and opened files.
- File database can help to find out the suspicious files.
- System resources detailed graphs.
- WMI browser and more.
4. SIW (System Information for Windows)
SIW technician’s version is a portable utility which can be run from USB to analyze and gather all the detailed information of the system. Check out some great features of it. It comes as home edition and technician edition. It is a paid utility. Below are some of its features.
Official Website:SIW official
- It can create a report file in many popular formats like HTML, XML, TXT etc.
- SIW can gather software information like product keys, serial numbers, AV Codecs, services, processes etc.
- It can gather all hardware information like CPU, sensors, chipset, memory video card, disk drives and other connected devices.
- Network configuration and open ports.
- Show the lost passwords hidden behind asterisks, mac address changer and many other useful tools.
5. HWiNFO
Popular and award-winning hwinfo is a free software utility for hardware monitoring and reporting with detailed analysis. It can generate reports and log files in XML, CSV and HTML Formats. It alerts about the system health by real-time monitoring. Customized tables and graphs option.
Download:HWinfo.exe
6. Speccy
Speccy is a hardware information tool by Piriform. It gives detailed information about motherboard, graphics card, CPU, RAM etc. It is a free utility. There are some more advanced features are available in its Pro version.
Download:Speccy.exe
7. hddscan
It is a disk drive diagnostic tool. HDDScan is available free to download. It can check storage devices including USB drives for bad sectors. You can change Some HDD parameters like AAM and APM. It shows the SMART information in detail. Temperature of the disk is also monitored by this utility. It is very helpful to get alert before your disk drive get damaged.
After diagnosing the technical issue on the computer software, technicians used the tools repair the PC. Check out Best tools with technician license to Fix and Repair PC.
Please let us know if you have any other software tool in your mind which can be useful to diagnose the computer. Share your experience in the comment section.
Download:HDDScan
I have a WD Elements drive that I use for Time Machine backups, I used Disk Utility to verify the disk, it found errors and I tried repairing it, which failed, so I reformatted the drive and it appears to be working for now... However when I attempt to verify the disk again via Disk Utility, it quickly spits back a response stating that everything is fine.
I am looking for SMART testing software that thoroughly tests the drive for errors. I checked out the downloads that WD offers for this drive but they only have this sort of diagnostic tool for Windows, whereas I need one for Mac OS X Lion. Every SMART diagnostic tool I have come across states that it supports Leopard/Snow Leopard.
Can anyone help me out here? Thanks in advance.
3 Answers
I think I'd have to agree and disagree with both of the other previous posters, more or less.
What you did was you likely had a sector go bad on your drive, so you reformatted it and during this process the bad sector got remapped to a spare sector.
Of the tools mentioned, as far as I'm concerned, Scannerz is probably the best hard drive tool on the market. It doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. It analyzes both the drive surface and mechanicals, and provides warnings that point out problems other miss. It is NOT new, it's almost 2 years old I think and I noticed it went up in price. They used to have a USB launchable version that I guess they got rid of.
I wouldn't dismiss SMART reporting and 'Smart Reporter' is, like Kurt said, a good choice. There are some SMART reporters out there that are commercial and flat out don't work. One of them actually interprets SMART data erroneously. I wouldn't be terribly alarmed if a SMART report showed some errors, but it shouldn't be misinterpreting them or reporting false errors.
A lot of the tools on the market for drives are getting really pretty old and they're outdated, and some of them appear to do nothing more than serve as interfaces to utilities that have long been on the OS. I'd say a good suite for handling problems would be:
a. Scannerz for hard drive scanning.b. SMART Reporter for SMART evaluationc. Disk Warrior for fixing indexing problems.
Disk Warrior hasn't been mentioned yet, and I don't even know if people still have indexing problems on their drives. I haven't for years, but some people swear by it.
Here's a couple tools that I've used for SMART on OSX Lion, both of which will do at a minimum SMART tests. The second is a full suite, of diagnostic and optimization tools.
General SMART utility - Smart Reporter
Full featured disk repair utility - Drive Genius 3
Check out Scannerz at http://www.scsc-online.com. Scannerz is a new tool that's supposed to be hardware oriented. It can not only do the regular surface scan other tools do, but it also has test procedures in the manual to help isolate problems that appear to be drive related but are in fact related to cabling or the drives control circuitry itself.
I was having problems with erratic behavior on a Firewire drive and other tools would give me a 'pass' on one test, then a 'fail' on another. The Scannerz users manual told me how to use the tool to evaluate the the system. Turned out the Firewire cable had an intermittent contact or break in it.
SMART, by the way isn't, IMHO, very good. It's erratically implemented across the board. I have an old Titanium with a 100G internal IDE drive that gets used for e-mail and light web work. The SMART software I use has been telling me that the drive is about to fail any minute....it's been telling me that for 3 years now. This is really an old klunker machine that gets used for odds and ends, so if the drive goes I don't care, but I was greatly surprised that several SMART implementations have been warning me so long about such a non-event.
Also, on Macs, SMART won't work on external drives, only internal drives. At least that's the way it is with USB and Firewire. Maybe it's different for Thunderbolt I/O. You might want to check the Wikipedia write up on SMART.
Hope that helps.
