have you ever had proprietary diagnostic utils actually work?

[wheresmybacon]

I'm speaking mostly of desktops and laptops here...

When a machine is obviously "sick" have you ever run a manufacturer supplied diagnostic utility tell you anything at all? Servers and network equipment are entirely different, so lets not lump that stuff in. Mostly I'm talking about the famed "Dell Diagnostics" or the diagnostic utilities supplied by IBM.

In my experience these utils have NEVER told me a damn thing. Ever. Bad memory; bad motherboard; failing hard drive; things you think a low-level util would pick up and throw a flag on simply pass the tests with flying colors.

I work in a large org so I have the luxury of having lots of parts to swap in when I suspect something, so it's really not a big deal. I just was curious if anyone HAS ever had the diagnostics tell you something you didn't already know or suspect.

 

[Modular]

Yep. On my mom's old Dimension 4100 I installed some new sticks of PC133, but they had chips on both sides which the MOBO didn't support. The lights came up and the code they referred to said incompatible RAM in the manual.

 

[wheresmybacon]

Originally posted by: Modular
Yep. On my mom's old Dimension 4100 I installed some new sticks of PC133, but they had chips on both sides which the MOBO didn't support. The lights came up and the code they referred to said incompatible RAM in the manual.

Wow nice. I sort of would suspect the mobo would be smart enough to do this, but you never know.

I'm mostly talking about software diagnostics though, not really the beep codes or LED readouts on the mobo. Dell specifically makes you do this when you call their business support line - they want to know an error code from their diagnostics app. Problem is the diagnostcs never detect anything, even when something is wrong.

You can download the diagnostic utils @ their support site, per model. It's an executable that creates 5 FLOPPY disks (lol, floppies?) that boot you into a non-windows environment then run a series of stress tests. My gripe is even when their really is a hardware problem they don't seem to detect it.