Friday, December 19, 2008

Benchmark Your PC - How Do You Stack Up?

Benchmarking and testing a PC falls into 2 categories;
Within a running PC or via a bootable disk.
The Inquisitor Hardware Testing and Certification System falls in both categories.

You can download the scripts to your PC and run them within your booted system or you can download the Live Cd and run the tests from a stable environment. I say 'stable' because you won't have a lot of background processes running in the Live environment then you would in a fully booted PC.

Another problem with running these tests inside a booted up PC is that the OS won't allow certain tests or portions of the test to access all of the hardware.
That's where the Live Cd comes in handy.

The Live Cd contains 25 various hardware testing modules. Each test has user configured parameters to allow for custom hardware testing.
Be advised!!!
The tests consist of destructive and non-destructive tests. The destructive hard drive tests will wipe your hard drive of all data. The other destructive tests have the potential of destroying your hardware.

It is recommended that the casual user selects the non-destructive tests and sets the time and cycle parameters to a low amount the first time they use this software.
That should not put any user off as these tests can be a very good tool for checking out a new computer or finding a premature hardware failure in an older system.

The Live Cd also has the benefit of not being tied to a certain O.S. or version.
It will boot up on almost any system that has sufficient Ram.
The installable test scripts are only available for Linux systems which makes the Live Cd the preferred usage.

Inquisitor also has an Enterprise version that allows the tests to be deployed over a network to 100's or 1000's of PC's in need of testing. This is geared towards the PC or hardware manufacturer who needs a quick and standardized method of testing their equipment before shipping.

So go and grab the scripts or Live Cd and see where your PC stands.
Test your friend's computer and see if it's as good as yours! LOL!!
Get the details and the files from their website found here;

Inquisitor Hardware Testing Website

Good luck and may your numbers be in specs.

TaZMAn

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