Getting a Diagnostic PC card - worth it?

[Mazgazine1]

I have been hired for a new IT position (Woo!) and one of the major first jobs I have his troubleshooting our out-of-warranty 'may not work' stock of 70 or so computers..

The only problem is we don' have a standard procedure or any real testing tools.. The way I test right now is pretty weak, I do reimage with ghost to make sure HDD is good, boot windows to make sure it doesn't explode.. Not much else after that..

I was wondering if any of you hardforum goers use any diagnostic PC cards? Are they worth getting? Do they greatly reduce the amount of overall work?

and of course, which one do you use?

Thank you for your time.

 

[uncola]

I've always been curious about these too. is this something they teach in A+ books?
this one on amazon gets good detailed reviews
http://www.amazon.com/Soyo-Computer...5?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1196841474&sr=8-5

 

[SockMan!]

I have one of those Soyo Techaids - and I only remember using it once (and that was only to confirm that my motherboard was bad).

It's only potentially useful for troubleshooting bootup problems. It'll display POST codes on the LEDs, which will be more detailed than the beeps (though the beep codes should give enough indication on simple problems like no RAM). It's useless if the computer successfully boots.

 

[bexamous]

post cards only going to 'help' you troubleshoot a board that does not post... usually we just use it to check if its getting past FF...

No CPU installed for example will give FF... a missing/bad bios chip does ff, broken motherboard does ff, bad cpu and so on.... if bios code starts running you'll get some output... if it hangs ad DX or EX its usually memory related problem... i've never seen it hang at anything else. Once the system posts the post card just gives out jibberish numbers that have no meaning. Some boards will nicely go back to FF.. others will just spin around through numbers... no purpose for a post card if a system posts.

I'd get an Ubuntu Live CD... takes 2 minutes to boot any board to a usable linux desktop. Actually at work for our RMA we got a modified ubuntu setup to boot off network and test as much stuff as it can find on the board.


It depends on what type of failures you are checking for... if the boards have no information at all its hard to test... to throughly test a board its hard to do in 5 minutes