Test Your PC’s Stability

Testing a PCs stability makes sense in a number of situations. Maybe you have made the decision to overclock your PC and want to make sure that everything runs well and stable, or you are thinking of giving away your old PC to a friend or family member who is not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to computers. Making sure that the system runs fine can save you troubleshooting sessions later on.

System Stability Tester is a free open source software for Windows, Linux and Mac systems that can stress test and benchmark a computer system. It does so by calculating up to 128 million digits of Pi which is extremely taxing for the processor.

When you first start the program you have the choice to run a benchmark or system stress test. A benchmark can be used to compare the results of a system to another system, the stress test to verify that there are no calculation errors.

You can also select the amount of Pi digits you want to compute, the turns, and the number of threads the computer should use for that task.

The stress testing application supports two pi computation algorithms: The Quadratic Convergence of Borwein and Gauss-Legendre with Borwein being selected by default.

Please note that you can only run a stress test if at least two threads are selected. The program then starts the calculation which can slow down the PC considerable during operation. Statistics are updated regularly that display the amount of calculated Pi digits, the state, and time it took to calculate them.

An overview at the top highlights the total amount of errors of the calculation as well as the processing time until the first error was detected.

You can optionally save a log file or a Pi file. The first saves basic information about the run, the second all Pi digits.

One of the core advantages of System Stability Tester is that it is available for Mac, Linux and Windows systems, which means that it can be used to compare the performance of computers running different operating systems.

Interested users can download System Stability Tester from the developer website over at Sourcerforge.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2012. | Permalink |
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Quickly Benchmark Hard Disk, Optical Drives and Network Servers

Sometimes you may want to benchmark drives or servers connected to your computer system, for instance to compare them to other devices or to test optimizations that you plan to make. Parkdale is a free benchmarking software for the Windows operating system that can be used to benchmark all drives that are currently connected to the PC.

And since it is a portable application, it can also be added to a troubleshooting collection on a CD, DVD or USB drive.

The program displays a list of all connected drives in its interface on startup. This includes all optical drives like CD and DVD drives, all hard drives and all connected network drives and servers.

You can start a benchmark right away by selecting a drive under QuickAccess and optionally changing the test file size and block size before clicking on the Start button to run the benchmark. This quick benchmark is not working on optical drives considering that they cannot be written to. The program displays the write speed and read speed in the interface after the benchmark run.

Two other benchmarking options are supported and accessible with a click on the respective tabs in the main program window.. File Access uses a regular file on the system to test the read and write speed. BlockAccess on the other hand can be used to test the reading or writing of file block (artificially created) on the system.

Both FileAccess and BlockAccess have configuration options to change the benchmark parameters. It is for instance possible to select specific block sizes, disable buffering or show a real-time transfer speed graph in another window.

Read speed benchmarking of optical drives worked fine, I could not get the write speed to be tested though. The program does not write a log or history of past benchmark runs which is a problem for many users who want to test their devices over time.

Windows users can download Parkdale from the developer website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Windows operating system. Some users may need to run the program with elevated rights.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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DNS Benchmark, Speed Test DNS Servers

One of the areas that a lot of computer users do not bother to optimize is the domain name server (DNS) of their Internet connection. A mediocre DNS not only slows down the connection speed on websites and Internet servers in general, but can also be the cause for connection issues and even censorship.

Selecting the right third party DNS provider should require at least some research on the user’s part to find the best suitable server. A user in the US for instance would not necessarily want to pick a European DNS provider and vice versa. Another aspect that plays a role besides speed is the legal situation if a DNS provider in a foreign country or by a foreign company is selected. Plus, you may get extras like options to filter out spam or specific types of sites automatically.

DNS Benchmark is a free portable software for the Windows operating system that can be used to test the speed of multiple DNS servers. The program ships with dozens of pre-added servers that include Google DNS and Open DNS among others. The program comes with options to add or remove particular domain name servers from the listing.

A click on run benchmark runs a series of tests that include name and owner look-ups, status messages and the response time. The latter is further divided into cached and uncached response times.

You can switch to a tabular data view which offers minimum, average and maximum values as well as a providers reliability in percentage.

The program works best for users who have found a few prospective DNS providers on the Internet. These users would add the server IPs of all prospective domain name servers to the DNS Benchmark software to test their speed and reliability.

Speed is of course only one of the variables that computer users need to look at. Interested Windows users can download DNS Benchmark from the official developer website. The program is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. An alternative is the previously reviewed Namebench.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: benchmark, dns, dns benchmark, portable software, windows software