Good diagnostics program that'll run through all the hardware?

[ChorniyVolk]

My current PC is a bit old and I'm worried about it, it has crashed on me twice recently and I'd like to know if that was just because of load or if the parts are slowly failing me.

Are there any programs that go through all the parts and diagnose the problems? I know, for instance, that there are a few for harddrives, but I'd like something that checks all of my working parts to see what's going on.

Does such a thing exist? I don't mind if I have to pay.

Thanks.

 

[AFurryReptile]

If there is, I've never heard of such a thing. Event viewer will show you a lot of different problems for all sorts of things, I'd start there. Ultimate Boot CD has a bunch of small programs for all sorts of things, like hard drive integrity tests. Memtest 86 will check your memory for faults. There's always Chkdsk and sfc /scannow for checking windows file structure integrity.

Don't underestimate a good defrag or disk cleanup, I've seen it work wonders in fixing problems. Run a good ccleaner to clean out your junk. It doesn't hurt to get something like Malwarebytes antimalware and check for viruses as well.

 

[Malak]

The only full diagnostic utilities I've found were proprietary ones made by companies like Dell and only for specific models.

Sometimes a reinstall of Windows does wonders too.

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

If it is very old, try adjusting your IDE settings to be slower. Sometimes the hard drives simply can not read/write as fast causing crashes.

After doing that, migrate to a new PC.

 

[tcsenter]

The problem is that BIST and diagnostic capabilities on computer hardware is kept to a bare minimum, usually just enough to bring up the circuit and test for valid voltage, pin strapping, flush some caches and test some registers that will actually touch 10% of the transistors in an IC, at most.

Software can manage or interface with good BIST capabilities if its there, but can't do much beyond create stressful data or access patterns in hopes of making something crash, pursuant to which one can make some reasonable inferences about the suspected cause or component, but cannot draw any reliable conclusions without a potentially extensive process of elimination.

That's a long winded way of saying, software might be able to push a weak component or element to some point of instability, but can't tell you what the culprit is. From there, pin-pointing the culprit is going to involve good old manual troubleshooting.

There are very limited exceptions. e.g. if a hard drive scan turns up bad sectors, you can bet there are bad sectors.