PC hardware diagnostic programs

J

JOhnH

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Are there any decent PC diagnostic programs available for free or a reasonable fee?

My Windows 10 PC has very frequent freezes. Usually it is temporary and frees up in a few seconds. But sometimes, it freezes solid and the only way to recover is a hard boot and power up.

It has an Intel Celeron CPU J1900 1.99GHZ and 16GB RAM

Sometimes I will be typing and the cursor stops moving. If I keep typing eventually SOME of the characters I typed show up. Sometimes I will be typing and all of a sudden a character will suddenly repeat. Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike thissssssssss.

I opened the case and the fans are running and there was no excessive dust.

I was running webroot and it would happen even when I disabled it. So I removed the program and the problem continued. I loaded MalwareBytes Premmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmium (see, it did it again). It found nothing and I still have the problem.

My computer repair guy said he could try to diagnose it but no guarantees.
 
I’d check CPU temp first. Make sure the thing isn’t going into thermal shutdown. Could be hard to catch though. Stupidly Windows doesn’t offer built in monitoring or logging.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3253340/how-to-check-your-cpu-temperature.html

Careful he bloatware with the free tools.

Temps and failed or clogged fans and heat pipe assemblies and dried out poor quality thermal compound paste or misapplied at the factory cause many problems on pre-built systems. We’ve taken stuff apart at work and found massive globs of compound between heat surfaces that was just acting as an insulator and making things worse.

Other stuff you might try is hammering the system with various benchmark tools to see if it failed specifically under load. There’s solid RAM and CPU and GPU benchmark software to stress each individual component. Don’t really have any favorites here.
 
Besides the above, watching task manager during freeze might give hints on who’s being naughty.

And of course a review of the Event Log in Windows for serious errors.

How old is the hard drive? Spinning platter or SSD? Failures in the logs?
 
Every time I had that issue and tracked it down it was a windows or software issue of some kind.

Which version of Win 10? 32 bit or 64 bit? I find 64 to be better, though it won't allow use of older 16 bit programs in the rare event you've still got one of those. Check what services are on - backup stuff, "phone-home" stuff, paging (shouldn't be a problem with that much memory, but it's not like Windoze is efficient), and even using stuff like OneDrive can cause that kind of stuff when it writes out or retrieves. And all the other stuff that Nate mentions.
 
If you have not reinstalled Windows in more than a year, you are overdue. It's just too much trouble to try to diagnose software issues unless you know what you are doing.

On the other hand, most of the lockups I have seen lately were from RAM and CPUs that were not solidly in their sockets, or were not making good electrical contact, due to operating in a dirty or smoke filled environment.
 
Check the Event Log.

Check for driver updates, especially for the chipset and the GPU (they may be one).

Running a benchmarking tool like Passmark may stress the troublesome component enough to force a fault, which at least would narrow it down.

Run Windows Memory Diagnostic.

If using a HDD, run a CHKDSK /f. It wouldn't hurt when using an SSD, either; but I've never had an SSD actually need a CHKDSK, even after a dirty shutdown.

Although it's not as important as it used to be, clearing out bad registry entries may help as long as you use a tool that doesn't create more problems than it solves. The registry cleaner in CCleaner was harmless enough last time I checked.

Rich
 
Might be worth checking the integrity of the OS files with

chkdsk /f - already mentioned above, no need to do it again.
sfc /scannow

both in an admin command window.

Also, how about creating a new user and trying from there in case it's something in the users profile? If that works, you can likely copy the data files over provided that you have installed software for "All users".
 
I took it apart again, blew out what little dust there was with a new can of air (boy, I hate paying for air). Then I decided to reseat the memory boards and a few of the other easily reseatable circuit boards.

So far, so good. The system has been acting normally for a few hours now.

I did run the memory diagnostics last night. It didn't find anything.
 
Ok, I spoke too soon. After about a day it started acting up again. I think it's time for a new computer. I can salvage the Solid State disk (and hope that isn't the problem) and possibly the Windows 10 license and get a decent new machine for a reasonable amount.
 
Last time I had a similar problem it turned out to be a bad power supply. But with windows it could be just about anything.
 
Once upon a time in a previous life, I built decent Home PC desktop computers for cheap and sold them at cost, just to do it. I had about a 30% warranty service call rate, due to bad RAM and other components.

I would end up replacing cheap parts with better cheap parts.

Sometimes it just doesn't work out...
 
Somewhat of a long shot, but a chipset fan may be worth a try.

Rich
 
IK04 said:
Once upon a time in a previous life, I built decent Home PC desktop computers for cheap and sold them at cost, just to do it. I had about a 30% warranty service call rate, due to bad RAM and other components.

I would end up replacing cheap parts with better cheap parts.

Sometimes it just doesn't work out...
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I started having a lot of RAM failures a year or so ago. I switched to G.SKILL Ripjaws RAM on the advice of a salesman at Micro Center. I've had no problems since, no matter how hard I abuse a machine. I'm surrounded by 112 GB of it within arms length as we speak.

Hardware manufacturers seem to have their golden ages, so this is a "for now" kind of thing. But when I built a new box for video editing about a month ago, it got 64 GB of G.SKILL Ripjaws RAM. No matter how long that machine renders at full bore, the RAM never complains.

Rich
 
I would start with a good virus check with something like RogueKiller https://www.adlice.com/download/roguekiller/ which can detect some issues that other virus detection software miss. Next, like others have suggested, get rid of any software that you haven't used in a long time. There are two free pieces of software that work great for this: Belarc Advisor (lists all your software applications and shows the ones you seldom use.) https://www.belarc.com/products_belarc_advisor and Should I Remove It https://www.shouldiremoveit.com/index.aspx which suggests removal of certain pieces of software. When you run Belarc Advisor look at the hard drive SMART status. SMART technology is built into the hard drives by the manufacturers as a way to predict drive failure. If it does not rate your hard drive as healthy, then head to Microcenter or other such store and pick up a new drive because you will need another one soon. If you are now running multiple virus protection software packages in active mode, then decide which one you like best and uninstall the rest. Multiple packages will conflict with each other and slow your computer to a crawl. Now comes the fun part. There is a software package called Tweaking Windows Repair. https://www.tweaking.com/content/page/windows_repair_all_in_one.html This software is awesome and does a number of checks on your computer while repairing any issues it finds as it goes. The free version works great. It may take a full day or more to complete all the checks. If this does not get your computer running satisfactorily, I would consider upgrading the motherboard and processor. You need to run Tweaking as an administrator and in safe mode.
 
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kshaw said:
I would start with a good virus check with something like RogueKiller https://www.adlice.com/download/roguekiller/ which can detect some issues that other virus detection software miss. Next, like others have suggested, get rid of any software that you haven't used in a long time. There are two free pieces of software that work great for this: Belarc Advisor (lists all your software applications and shows the ones you seldom use.) https://www.belarc.com/products_belarc_advisor and Should I Remove It https://www.shouldiremoveit.com/index.aspx which suggests removal of certain pieces of software. When you run Belarc Advisor look at the hard drive SMART status. SMART technology is build into the hard drives by the manufacturers as a way to predict drive failure. If it does not rate your hard drive as healthy, then head to Microcenter or other such store and pick up a new drive because you will need another one soon. If you are now running multiple virus protection software packages in active mode, then decide which one you like best and uninstall the rest. Multiple packages will conflict with each other and slow your computer to a crawl. Now comes the fun part. There is a software package called Tweaking Windows Repair. https://www.tweaking.com/content/page/windows_repair_all_in_one.html This software is awesome and does a number of checks on your computer while repairing any issues it finds as it goes. The free version works great. It may take a full day or more to complete all the checks. If this does not get you computer running satisfactorily, I would consider upgrading the motherboard and processor. You need to run Tweaking as an administrator and in safe mode.
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Good advice.
After I reported my "good news" (that I opened it up and cleaned it and re-seated a bunch of boards and it ran fine) it started acting up again after a few days.

I took it to a good local repair shop and told them if they couldn't fix it, salvage what they could (eg. SS disk) and build me a new machine.

Next day he called and mine was fixed. He cleaned it out better than I did, including one fan that he said was limping along. When he cleaned the fan, it sped up but was making a loud shrieking noise, so he replaced the fan. He ran a couple of HW scans that were negative and he ran a couple of virus scans that turned up a couple of things that my Malwarybytes (Premium eddition) didn't. He buttoned it up and charged me $60. It has been running like new for about a week now.

I was only mildly disappointed. I sort of wanted a new system. But this computer serves 100% of my needs, except that everyone always wanst faster, but I am better off now and can spend the money on some stimulus sorts of things.

I'll look into some of those other software suggestions, even if I don't think I need them now.

Thanks.
 
After three sudden death incidents that included a "pop," I went ahead and bought a new motherboard, CPU and 64GB of RAM.

All these parts were extreme high performance components and cost way more than I would ever imagine I would pay for my own machine. They'd better fscking work!

Great to hear you are back in business for only $60. I like hearing happy endings like that!
 
IK04 said:
After three sudden death incidents that included a "pop," I went ahead and bought a new motherboard, CPU and 64GB of RAM.

All these parts were extreme high performance components and cost way more than I would ever imagine I would pay for my own machine. They'd better fscking work!

Great to hear you are back in business for only $60. I like hearing happy endings like that!
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I like lots of RAM. I'm curious, however, why you're installing 64GB? I have that (plus 6GB of video RAM) in a an i9-9900k machine that's used exclusively for video editing. On other machines, however, I usually stop at 32GB because it's unlikely I'll ever use even that much.

Rich
 
RJM62 said:
I like lots of RAM. I'm curious, however, why you're installing 64GB? I have that (plus 6GB of video RAM) in a an i9-9900k machine that's used exclusively for video editing. On other machines, however, I usually stop at 32GB because it's unlikely I'll ever use even that much.

Rich
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Same.

I only go above 32GB on motherboards that can properly multi-lane the RAM and are running virtual machine loads.

Unless you’re using Chrome. Then you get a pass for putting 128 GB in it.

Hahaha.

Usually as you get to motherboards that can multi-lane that much RAM and do DDR4 / etc... you’re talking server boards.

Otherwise you can be log jamming talking to each large stick in a limited number of RAM slots.
 
denverpilot said:
Same.

I only go above 32GB on motherboards that can properly multi-lane the RAM and are running virtual machine loads.

Unless you’re using Chrome. Then you get a pass for putting 128 GB in it.

Hahaha.

Usually as you get to motherboards that can multi-lane that much RAM and do DDR4 / etc... you’re talking server boards.

Otherwise you can be log jamming talking to each large stick in a limited number of RAM slots.
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In the Intel world, I suspect most Z390- or Z490-based motherboards should be able to handle it. I haven't researched it much beyond my own selection, though.

Rich
 
RJM62 said:
In the Intel world, I suspect most Z390- or Z490-based motherboards should be able to handle it. I haven't researched it much beyond my own selection, though.
Click to expand...

Same problem here. Still happily running on nothing higher than a second gen i7 on personal stuff. No video tasks so most processors are total overkill for me.

Noticed that intel in their desperation to counter AMD smoking their asses at the moment announced the release of a new i3 chip — it’s literally one of their older quad core i7 chips rebadged.

They can’t counter the AMD tech jump at all with Covid going on. Normally they’d get mad and do it in about six months but they’re not going to counter with real new tech and fabs for a year or more, I bet.

Lenovo also seems to have hit their Dev cycle timing well and is crushing it on new models and pricing.

Apple is stuck with Intel and that’ll hurt them on anybody actually buying on price/performance ratio. On non-mobile machines anyway. Can already buy a pre-configured Lenovo that smokes most Macs and will load hackintosh without anything done to it hardware wise, at all.

Lenovo even joined the “we’ll pre-load Fedora with all drivers” laptop crowd this week. Only have to download proprietary Nvidia drivers if you choose to have a GPU.

Some tech companies doing really well during this. Some totally hosed.

Apple releasing the iPhone SE update at the price they did was a master move though. Those will sell. They delayed the entire rest of the mobile lineup for better times when people want $1000+ devices again.
 
denverpilot said:
Same problem here. Still happily running on nothing higher than a second gen i7 on personal stuff. No video tasks so most processors are total overkill for me.

Noticed that intel in their desperation to counter AMD smoking their asses at the moment announced the release of a new i3 chip — it’s literally one of their older quad core i7 chips rebadged.

They can’t counter the AMD tech jump at all with Covid going on. Normally they’d get mad and do it in about six months but they’re not going to counter with real new tech and fabs for a year or more, I bet.

Lenovo also seems to have hit their Dev cycle timing well and is crushing it on new models and pricing.

Apple is stuck with Intel and that’ll hurt them on anybody actually buying on price/performance ratio. On non-mobile machines anyway. Can already buy a pre-configured Lenovo that smokes most Macs and will load hackintosh without anything done to it hardware wise, at all.

Lenovo even joined the “we’ll pre-load Fedora with all drivers” laptop crowd this week. Only have to download proprietary Nvidia drivers if you choose to have a GPU.

Some tech companies doing really well during this. Some totally hosed.

Apple releasing the iPhone SE update at the price they did was a master move though. Those will sell. They delayed the entire rest of the mobile lineup for better times when people want $1000+ devices again.
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I haven't used Fedora on a machine with an Nivdia card in a while, but in general, the Nouveau driver isn't horrible.

I've been partial to Intel for machines that do productive work for a long time, and for reasons that aren't really the case anymore: I encountered a lot of stability problems with machines with K6-2 and Athlon processors back when DX9 came out. I guess that would be some time around 2002 or 2003. Machines that had been running fine would start randomly locking up and crashing several times a day.

if the client had a good backup, restoring would solve the problem. If they'd made a System Restore point prior to updating, rolling back usually worked. If not, then manually uninstalling DX9 and rolling back to DX8 wouldn't solve the problem. The system would need to be reinstalled in that case.

I just started pushing Intel again for my business clients and myself. Several years later, I learned that the problem was actually with a particular series of Via chipsets, not the AMD CPU itself. So I started using AMD again from time to time, but stuck to Intel for revenue machines.

The machine I'm using now is running on a Ryzen, and it's a revenue machine. My godson convinced me to build it and even sent me most of the parts to shame me into doing so. It runs fine and is a revenue machine that replaced an i7 machine that I plan to set up as a guest machine. The machine to my right runs on an i9 and was built for video editing, and required an Intel processor for hardware encoding on my preferred video editing software. It also runs fine and is a revenue machine.

So I'm in both camps now. Or maybe neither. I basically design the machine around the mission.

Rich
 
denverpilot said:
Same.

I only go above 32GB on motherboards that can properly multi-lane the RAM and are running virtual machine loads.

Unless you’re using Chrome. Then you get a pass for putting 128 GB in it.

Hahaha.

Usually as you get to motherboards that can multi-lane that much RAM and do DDR4 / etc... you’re talking server boards.

Otherwise you can be log jamming talking to each large stick in a limited number of RAM slots.
Click to expand...

Yep. This is a Ryzen 9 system with 16 cores running at 3.7 Ghz. and I will be running several VMs in parallel pipelines...
 
RJM62 said:
...I've been partial to Intel for machines that do productive work for a long time, and for reasons that aren't really the case anymore: I encountered a lot of stability problems with machines with K6-2 and Athlon processors back when DX9 came out. I guess that would be some time around 2002 or 2003. Machines that had been running fine would start randomly locking up and crashing several times a day.

...Several years later, I learned that the problem was actually with a particular series of Via chipsets, not the AMD CPU itself. So I started using AMD again from time to time, but stuck to Intel for revenue machines.

Rich
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I was in that exact same situation back in 2002-2006!

I migrated away from VIA chipsets when the Athlon series were only available on boards the I previously thought were too cheap to use. Remember Chips and Tech? They turned out to be MSI motherboards and were rock solid! In the last few machines I have built, I've settled on Gigabyte boards with no failures (until now!).

Via faded away and focused on other products, so I adapted.

I've been non-Intel and non-Microsoft since 1996...
 
IK04 said:
I was in that exact same situation back in 2002-2006!

I migrated away from VIA chipsets when the Athlon series were only available on boards the I previously thought were too cheap to use. Remember Chips and Tech? They turned out to be MSI motherboards and were rock solid! In the last few machines I have built, I've settled on Gigabyte boards with no failures (until now!).

Via faded away and focused on other products, so I adapted.

I've been non-Intel and non-Microsoft since 1996...
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I really have no issues with either AMD or Intel, other than Intel chips being overpriced. But good timing can get around that to an extent. I don't think I ever paid list for an Intel chip. I usually wait until Micro Center or New Egg have them on sale as loss leaders. Intel is also falling behind the bleeding edge, but I doubt they care very much. They've never been especially popular with gamers or overclockers. They market more to businesses and the server market, where they still have a lot of inertia.

I've had pretty good luck with Gigabyte and MSI over the years. This machine is built on an MSI mobo, and the Intel machine on a Gigabyte one. Asrock, not so much. Their QA leaves a lot to be desired. I haven't used any others in recent years.

After the VIA fiasco, I no longer use chipsets other than those made by the CPU manufacturer. By the way, VIA did make at least one CPU. My neighbor's kid brought me his PC to fix back in the early 2000s, and it had a VIA CPU. I'd never seen one before, and haven't seen one since.

Rich
 
RJM62 said:
By the way, VIA did make at least one CPU. My neighbor's kid brought me his PC to fix back in the early 2000s, and it had a VIA CPU. I'd never seen one before, and haven't seen one since.

Rich
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I have a Micro[something...] computer I bought from Walmart.com and it has that soldered in VIA chip. Believe it or not, it was the last of the Cyrix family of CPUs that I loved in the early '90s! Via bought out the remains of the NatSemi selloff of the Cyrix patents and then sold it all to someone else, probably AMD...

I bought that computer because it was $199.00 and had Lindows distribution on it. That didn't last long, but it was fun while it lasted... Linspire eventually fizzled out and faded away, like SCO and Caldera...

</meganerd>
 
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IK04 said:
I have a Micro[something...] computer I bought from Walmart.com and it has that soldered in VIA chip. Believe it or not, it was the last of the Cyrix family of CPUs that I loved in the early '90s! Via bought out the remains of the NatSemi sellof of the Cyrix patents and then sold it all to someone else, probably AMD...

I bought that computer because it was $199.00 and had Lindows distribution on it. That didn't last long, but it was fun while it lasted... Linspire eventually fizzled out and faded away, like SCO and Caldera...

</meganerd>
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I remember Caldera and Lindows. I also liked Corel Linux quite a bit. I believe it was a Debian fork. But the most interesting Linux I ever used was called XandrOS. One of the company's backers was a client of mine, and he had them send me a free copy. It was built on Debian, but it included a version of WiNE on steroids that ran practically every Windows program I loaded on it, including IE. As I recall, the only one it didn't run well was Adobe Fireworks.

Unfortunately, the project fizzled out. As I recall it had something to do with violations of the GPL.

The most interesting recent / current desktop Linux, in my opinion, is Manjaro. It's built on Arch, but designed to be friendly enough for noobs to use productively immediately upon installation. It doesn't quite succeed because of a buggy updater / package manager GUI that errors out without an easy way to figure out exactly why. Usually it's a corrupted package or an obsolete key. A single corrupt package or bad key will halt the entire update process.

The frequency of update problems is such that I skip the GUI package manager and update from the terminal, refreshing all the keys and clearing out the caches first. Why they don't just write those steps into the script, I don't know. But it's a bad mark on an otherwise excellent, friendly distro.

For public servers, I still use CentOS. I also still have cPanel installed on two of them, but all new accounts are being put on CentOS with Virtualmin if they want a panel. That started out as a cost-cutting move when cPanel jacked up their prices, but I'm actually starting to like Virtualmin better anyway. That's probably a function of my getting better with Perl. I also install AwStats, RoundCube, and PHP MyAdmin on them, which seem to be the only things most clients coming over from cPanel care about, anyway.

Rich
 
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Good summary of the just announced Ryzen 3 AMD processors.

I love the comment that says AMD shot Intel and when they might have twitched, they shot their corpse with these two “little” processors. LOL

$100 motherboard, $100 processor, and specs that match an older Intel i7 but better I/O by going to quad lane PCI and still toss in six SATA lanes, because why not?

$20 more bucks and this quad core eight thread processor can peak out under load at over 4.5 GHz... and... they include a solid CPU cooler that’ll work, for free.

Wendell’s maniacal laughter is also funny...

Pretty impressive AMD. Not bad for a company that had to take a massive write down on video stuff they couldn’t sell a couple of years ago because it didn’t work well.

Intel is going to need a tourniquet and a medic if they don’t drop prices into the cellar on their low end stuff now. Many of their procs in the low end, you still have to go get the cooler, so the value proposition just falls apart.

Applause to AMD for taking the kill shot. Here’s hoping they’re making enough profit on these.


Today must have been embargo day because s the tech outlets had pre-made videos for this. I just like the Kentucky guy. I haven’t seen a video title yet that wasn’t positive on this headshot by AMD.

Pretty cool. I’ve seen server farm monster machines in the past that didn’t perform this well.
 
To finish off my new system, I just ordered a 2TB PCIE v.4 X4 Nvme M.2 drive for my working partitions... 5000 MB/s (read) and 4400 MB/s (write).

That will replace my 2.0TB spinny drive and all my storage will be on a 8TB RAID array...

How times have changed!
 
Basic windows Performance Monitor tool is a great place to start. I had similar problems on a Lenovo laptop a few years back and discovered that I was having virtual memory problems and the disk was thrashing all the time. That was a dual core CPU, but one CPU was always parked and the other was averaging 10% because of waiting on the disk. I doubled the memory and performance went up by a factor of 10 at least.

You might also spend time in the Task Manager watching what programs are running - keep it open in a corner. When you freeze, it may show you what program is running. Note the process ID and then try to identify it from there.

I haven't seen it with Windows 10, but the search indexing used to cause this kind of perfromance issue.

Best of luck...
 
What sort of load would make a J1900 overheat? I had to look, it's a 10W chip. I'd need to run that PC in a bread oven to get it to thermal throttle. :D
 
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