One would surely find themselves in a position where they would wish to test their hardware. Whether it would be to do a stress test of your new laptop’s hardware, hardware test of your second hand laptop or to understand the threshold of your hardware to overclock it.
Now there are number of ways to test PC hardware. Windows itself has got a set of tools and you can even go ahead with few third party tools. I have listed few in this post. Lets get started with few default Windows tools.
Best Ways To Test PC Hardware
Default Windows Tools For Testing Computer Hardware
Resource & Performance Monitor
To launch this tool, all you need to do is get on to RUN utility and type in perfmon /report. And the moment you click on OK, it would launch the tool and start collecting data. It would take some time, and once its done it would present you with a detailed report.
The whole report might be a tough nut to crack but you can check out the Diagnostic Results – Warnings and the Resource Overview as it would be summarized report of what’s not going well on your machine. The report would be self explanatory that even a non technical guy would understand the entire thing in and out.
Windows Memory Diagnostic
This particular tool would test the RAM put on your Windows machine. And you can navigate as below to launch this tool:
Start Menu > Administrative Tools > Windows Memory Diagnostic
Once you click on this tool, it would ask if you would want to restart you computer. Go ahead with the restart option and you will see a text on your screen saying that test is under progress. And once its done, you would be presented with a detailed report about the WRONG things that you wanted to know about your RAM (if any).
Third Party Tools
Its a free program which is meant to do stress testing in terms of endurance, reliability and stability of your computer’s hardware, software, network inventory, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status. And once the whole thing is studied properly by the tool, it would display the same on a web page. Its an easy to use tool. Just go ahead and check it out.
As the name suggests its a Wizard sort of thing which would tell you whats wrong on your machine. Whether it would the performance of your CPU, RAM, Flash media, CD / DVD drive, graphics or any damn thing on your machine, this particular tool would tell you all.
Yes, there are many more tools that you have in the market, but these are the ones that I believe are the best ones to test PC hardware.