T
the wharf rat
Look, mister-I'm-not-an-EE-but-I-play-one-on-the-net,
you can't use a multimeter to test a switching power supply.
What if the poor guy didn't buy his machine from a "responsible
computer manufactuer"? What if he's upgraded a card and the canned routines
fail anyway? What if the failed part is the disc drive with the diagnostic
partition, or it's a problem you can't diagnose with the useful but minimal
software the "responsible computer manufactuer" included?
It's hard to write diagnostics that can find a bad cable, for
instance.
The easiest and cheapest way to diagnose hardware issues in a simple
home PC is the swap in known good parts method.