Here is a question I'm a bit bashful to ask: What are some good hardware test suites?
Background: A neighbor of mine had an old K6-2 333MHz with 64MB of RAM and 4GB hard drive. He had crashing problems with it; at some consistent spot in the WinXP installer the thing would reboot unexpectedly; Linux installs would fail with a kernel panic. Eventually he gave up and gave the thing to me. (It is my first i386 box for a long while!) Sure enough, after a while of installing the base sets of NetBSD, the thing plopped into the kernel debugger on a bogus address. I noticed that the CPU fan was horribly loud, so I took it out, re-seated the CPU, the memory, and all the cards, and re-installed the processor heatsink and fan. It looked like the heatsink had not been seated properly, because I was able to run the box through 4 or 5 passes of memtest86, install NetBSD, and compile lynx successfully. (Also the fan was much quieter after I put it on straight.) The problem is that the K6-2 is much slower than I expect. Before you guffaw, realize that I have several boxes from that era, and even the Mac 6500 (275 MHz 603ev) seems much faster. The Mac does have 96 MB of RAM, but that doesn't matter: I compiled lynx on the K6-2, and it took at least 4, maybe 6 hours-- I don't know, I went to sleep before it finished, but as long as I kept tabs on it the swap was not touched. I realize there are scads of confounding factors here, including the fact that the box could just be that slow "by nature" (if an artifact can have a nature). However, I'd like to assure myself that the hardware was not damaged by its sorrowful abuse. What are some good tests I can run to test out the various components? memtest86 seems successful, lynx compiled successfully, if slowly. Thanks much. -- Arlie Capps (soon to be no longer a) CS student at BYU
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