Can you recommend any free diagnostic utilitly please? That could be for
motherboard, graphic card, hard disk, etc.. and plus any other utility you
think could be helpful for troubleshooting and maintenance.
The most useful diagnostic tools are already part of the XP operating
system:
- Event Log
- Performance Monitor
- Task Manager
- netdiag (from the Support Tools on the XP CD)
- Notepad (for reading *.log text files)
- systeminfo (at a command prompt)
Many users overlook these extremely useful and powerful tools, which are
already installed by default and ready to use in XP!
Process Explorer and Process Monitor are also very useful tools,
available for free from SysInternals, now part of Microsoft:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/sysinternals/default.aspx
To understand network behaviour and troubleshoot network problems, the
canonical Windows tool is Network Monitor, aka NetMon:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...1d-06cb-4658-b7f6-3088333d062f&displaylang=en
(NetMon is supplied with Windows Server, but it's a download for
Workstation).
The Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit has many useful diagnostic
utilities, most of which work equally well on XP. Again it's a free
download from Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD&displaylang=en
The Windows Debugging Tools can show you *exactly* what the system is
doing on the inside; although, they do require a little skill and
knowledge to use effectively:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx
For hardware-specific diagnostics (motherboard, hard disks etc) many
vendors supply troubleshooting utilities via their website. In any case,
even vendor-supplied drivers will log significant events in the Windows
Event Log (this is required to get their drivers Microsoft-certified).
Many vendor drivers also provide ETW (Event Tracing for Windows), which
can be turned on using the Debugging tools:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163437.aspx
To detect what hardware is installed on an unknown machine, I have had
great success with SIW, written by Gabriel Topala:
http://www.gtopala.com
SIW is pretty much the only non-Microsoft or vendor-specific tool I use
for working on Windows issues.
Many 3rd party utilities downloaded from the web only repeat the same
information (sometimes incomplete or inaccurately) that you can get from
the OS itself. Sometimes they also let you directly manipulate system
data (eg disk blocks) in very dangerous ways, instead of going through
documented OS APIs. Occasionally, they're also vectors for viruses and
malware. So I'd recommend you avoid them; unless you have a really
specific purpose in mind.
An oscilloscope could be useful for the really tricky problems; but
hopefully you won't hit too many of those!
Hope this helps,
Andrew
