townx

I've got a slightly unstable computer at the moment which I've been trying to diagnose. Still haven't worked out exactly what's wrong (it freezes randomly in both Windows and Linux), but I have found some useful testing tools on the way (for Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex unless otherwise stated).

Memory

Recent Ubuntu Linux distros include MemTest86+, a memory testing tool. You just select this option from the grub boot menu when your computer starts and it boots into a dedicated memory testing OS. The tests are fairly simple to get going, but taking hours, literally. You need to run them overnight.

Hard disks

The smartmontools package includes some testing tools for hard disks which have S.M.A.R.T. capability (most modern motherboards and hard disks support this). Once you've installed the package, you can use the smartctl command line tool to run diagnostics on your hard disks.

I used this tool like this:

$ sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sda

This starts the test, which will take a fair amount of time (mine took around 30 minutes for a 40Gb disk). Once it's finished, you can do:

$ sudo smartctl -H /dev/sda

to see the results. Mine looked like this:

smartctl version 5.37 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

CPU

A simple test to max out your CPU (and exercise your graphics card) is to run GLX gears:

$ glxgears -info

However, that doesn't really stress your system. For that, I used a tool called CPU Burn-in. This is ostensibly an overclockers tool, but what it does is attempt to push your CPU to maximum operating temperature so you can see whether it's stable. It's a binary download, so it's very easy to use, and has a Linux version. Unzip it, cd to the directory, and run:

./cpuburn-in 10

where 10 is the number of minutes you want to run the tests for. This one scared me a bit, as I watched the temperature of my CPU and system slowly climb. Read the caveats and warnings on the web site before running this tool.

Monitoring

While you're doing all this, you want to watch the system temperature etc. For this, you can use the xsensors tool. This is a simple apt-get on Ubuntu, but for some reason the default config. file is in the wrong place (it's called /etc/sensors3.conf but the app. is expecting /etc/sensors.conf). You can tell it where the config. file is using the -c switch, e.g.

./xsensors -c /etc/sensors3.conf

This displays a graphical readout of various system temperatures, fan speeds etc..

You can also watch various aspects of system usage by adding the hardware monitor applet to your panel (right-click on the panel and select Hardware Monitor). This lets you watch how much your CPU, memory, disks etc. are being utilised.