The Global Leader in PC & Android System Health Solutions

Year: 2007 (Page 9 of 16)

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Hardware Diagnostics

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My coworker and I decided to perform an experiment. For six weeks we called computer repair shops across the US and Canada and asked them what features they would like to see in hardware diagnostic tools. We received a wide range of feedback from you guys. Some used words not appropriate for this blog, one guy invited me to be a guest speaker on his radio show and several of you used the phone call as a forum to vent about some man in Redmond, Washington. The majority of the technicians we contacted did have questions–the same three questions, actually.

1. “Why Would I Need Hardware Diagnostic Tools? I’ve Been Fixing Computers for Twenty Years!”

I heard this statement a lot. It was often followed by a grumble, or perhaps a dial tone. The answer may not be obvious, but understanding the value of hardware diagnostics will save a technician time, money, and frustration. As we all know, operating systems are more complex than they used to be. Determining whether an issue is an actual hardware problem or a software problem has become increasingly difficult. For example, a system can have random blue-screens in Windows and yet the dump file doesn’t have any specific information as to the problem. Is it hardware or is it a software problem? In one particular case, a portion of the memory was bad and had not been detected in the Windows OS because the OS was masking the problem. It was only when DOS diagnostics were run to completely verify the system that the faulty memory location was identified. Twenty years of experience in fixing computers could never identify this problem!

2. “I’m already using free tools I downloaded off the web, or some other product. Why should I pay for yours?”

Because I said so. Really, there are lots of reasons. I’ll explain a few.

  • Simply put, we are the market leader. No other diagnostic company ships more diagnostic licenses than PC-Doctor. We ship more than 1 million licenses per month and, according to a recent report, own more than 50% market share. Our Service Center product is based on the same software that the worldâÂ?Â?s largest OEMs ship on more than a million PCs every month. That means we create builds every day that big companies like IBM, HP, Lenovo, Fujitsu and others use in manufacturing, support and service environments. Hence, we are able to refresh ourService Center product with the most up-to-date, reliable diagnostics. For example, we have supported the Vista OS since its release. No other diagnostic product/company has announced native support forVista.

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  • We are more economical. Leaving accuracy and currency aside, products that compete with Service Center cost anywhere from $200 to $800 more.

  • We are more accurate. We test on dozens of systems and against scores of leading components from the world’s leading PC manufacturers and component manufacturers before their products are released to our customers. We have a large QA (Quality Assurance) lab with more than 100 systems. Additionally, through our CHV (Certified Hardware Vendor) program, we work directly with the major component manufacturers to assure diagnostic accuracy for their devices.

  • That brings up another point:. “Wait, then how are your products better than the diagnostics I currently get from OEMs?”

While OEMs write diagnostics specifically for their hardware components, they are not able to effectively write diagnostics for all hardware components. We have acquired vast experience through working with numerous OEMs and component vendors. That gives us a better overall hardware diagnostic vision.<

  • “What could be wrong with free diagnostics offered on the web?”

Besides legal implications that have been occurring lately, you do not know the expertise of the person or people writing these. It’s just risky.

3. “Most of our issues are software related. How can we justify the cost of hardware diagnostics?”
To quickly and easily determine if you have a hardware problem. I’ll give you an example. A large test instrument manufacturer had a problem which the software engineers were saying was a hardware issue. They were able to run PC-Doctor diagnostics for a couple of hours on burn-in and everything passed. They went back to the software engineer and said the hardware passed. The engineer, knowing how accurate and reliable PC-Doctor diagnostics are, was receptive and found the problem with their code. You will probably save the entire cost of the software the first time you quickly run our diagnostics and prove it’s not a hardware issue.

With that said, we learned a lot from you guys during this experiment and welcome your feedback regarding new features and functionality.

Why Aren’t PCs as Pretty as Macs?

If you walk into an Apple store, and you manage to find the corner that sells Macs, you’ll find some fairly attractive looking machines. A lot of them aren’t big black boxes, for example. Why can’t I buy a PC that looks like this?

You probably want me to say that gaming PCs are designed to be attractive. That’s true, as long as you believe that any money spent on appearance looks good. Alienware right now is selling desktops that look like alien insects. That’s not what I want, though. I want a machine that tries to blend in and look nice at the same time. The current round of iMacs do this admirably.

Maybe a gaming PC isn’t the answer? I can imagine that. Gamers who want to slaughter thousands of cartoons might not want something attractive. How about a high end home theater system? Voodoo PC makes some right now that are designed for exactly this. Are they attractive? Well, they’re still big boxes, but, since you’re paying $5k for them, you get to choose any color you want, and it’s got a cute display on the front.

No, I’m not looking for this. I want a PC that was designed from the ground up to look good. I want a piece of furniture that does what it has to do and doesn’t take up any more of my attention than it deserves. It’s got an on button and a DVD drive. It doesn’t deserve my attention.

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I doubt this is realistic. Voodoo PC manages to sell $5000 home theater PCs. I’m going to guess that they could use some notebook technology and not lose much of their profit margin. Performance isn’t that important for the PC that I want. All my PC does is surf the web, play DVDs, and occasionally edit photos. I’m even willing to pay extra!

Is there a technical problem with this? Perhaps the ATX motherboard specs force PC manufacturers to have a large rectangle available for the board, and they can’t make the crazy shapes that Apple can get away with. While this is a reasonable cop out for a small shop, what about large manufacturers? Dell might be screwed because people don’t normally get to see Dells before they buy them. A PC like this would be centered around its appearance. Then what about HP? They could afford to make a motherboard in whatever shape they wanted. Users would get to see the machine in the store before they buy it. It’d be just like a piece of furniture.

Could copyright restrictions be the problem? Apple is extremely possessive when it comes to its designs. Is it possible that I’m too picky, and Apple has prevented anyone from making anything remotely similar to their machines? I sure hope not!

So far, I’m not coming up with any answers. I hope someone out there can shed some light on this.

Working with Vista

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I’ve been working with Vista for a little under a year now. There are some things that I like, a lot, and some things I don’t like. Maybe others with Vista experience can chime in, maybe some even have some workarounds to temper the annoying parts of the OS. Off the top of my head, these are two things I don’t quite like about Vista:

1) Consistency

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2) Interoperability

Say I launch Wordpad in administrative mode to edit a few files. I can’t drag and drop files, even from administrative explorer windows! Nor can I right click and edit the file, again from within the administrative explorer window. There are a few workarounds, such as making an administrative Wordpad shortcut, but nothing out of the box. The best I can figure is to turn off UAC, which I happen to like (at least in principle if not in implementation).

WHAT GOOGLE LEARNED ABOUT HDDS

I ran across the article on the BBC site and found it interesting. Bottom line, Google scientists were surprised to learn that the effects of high activity levels and high temperatures are not always as bad as traditionally thought.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6376021.stm

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http://209.85.163.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Wireless Networking in Windows PE 1.6

A while back one of our customers came to us wanting to add wireless network tests to their test scripts on Windows PE. Anyone familiar with Windows PE knows that setting up any hardware support can be difficult as all drivers must be manually installed to the image before booting into it. In addition to that Windows PE does not include any wireless tools or a good command line method to configure a wireless connection. Back when this came up I was pretty new to Windows PE so trying to figure this out was almost a crash course in Windows PE. Continue reading

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