Hardware Diagnostics?

[Randall R Schulz]

Hello,

 From time to time I cast about for software that will perform 
hardware diagnostics. To date, I've come up completely empty. As a 
youg 'un learning computers with PDP-11s and VAXes all about, we 
always had low-level diagnostics we could run to find bad memory 
locations, processor glitches, I/O channel problems, disk errors, etc.

Is this no longer true? Is it one of those things that separates the 
"desktop" / personal computer from the workstation and mainframe? 
Does anyone know of any programs that fit this general description? 
I'm most interested in RAM and cache diagnostics, since that seems 
like the most likely point of failure. CPU diagnostics would be nice, 
too and I feel least concerned about the disk. If my concerns are 
askew, please enlighten me.

Any help of any sort would be appreciated!

Thanks.

Randy Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA

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