How to Diagnose Hardware Issues Laptop

Concluding that your computer has a hardware problem is merely the commencement step. If y'all're dealing with a hardware consequence and not a software issue, the next stride is determining what hardware trouble you're actually dealing with.

If you purchased a laptop or pre-built desktop PC and it'southward notwithstanding nether warranty, you don't demand to care about this. Accept the manufacturer prepare the PC for yous — figuring it out is their trouble.

If yous've built your ain PC or yous want to fix a computer that's out of warranty, this is something you'll need to exercise on your ain.

Blue Screen 101: Search for the Error Message

RELATED: Everything You Need To Know Almost the Blue Screen of Death

This may seem like obvious advice, simply searching for data about a blueish screen's error message can help immensely. Most blue screens of expiry you'll encounter on modernistic versions of Windows volition probable exist acquired by hardware failures. The bluish screen of death frequently displays data about the driver that crashed or the type of fault it encountered.

For instance, let's say yous encounter a blue screen that identified "NV4_disp.dll" as the driver that caused the bluish screen. A quick Google search will reveal that this is the driver for NVIDIA graphics cards, so y'all at present have somewhere to showtime. It's possible that your graphics card is failing if you lot encounter such an error message.

Bank check Hard Drive SMART Condition

RELATED: How to See If Your Hard Drive Is Dying with S.One thousand.A.R.T.

Hard drives have a congenital in South.M.A.R.T. (Cocky-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) characteristic. The idea is that the hard drive monitors itself and will notice if it starts to neglect, providing y'all with some advance notice earlier the drive fails completely. This isn't perfect, and then your hard bulldoze may neglect even if SMART says everything is okay.

If you see whatsoever sort of "SMART error" message, your hard drive is failing. You tin can utilise SMART assay tools to view the SMART health status data your hard drives are reporting.

Test Your RAM

RAM failure tin can result in a variety of bug. If the computer writes data to RAM and the RAM returns different data because it's malfunctioning, you may come across application crashes, blueish screens, and file organisation corruption.

To exam your memory and see if it's working properly, use Windows' born Memory Diagnostic tool. The Retention Diagnostic tool will write data to every sector of your RAM and read it back afterwards, ensuring that all your RAM is working properly.

Check Heat Levels

How hot is is inside your calculator? Overheating can rsult in bluish screens, crashes, and abrupt shut downs. Your computer may be overheating because you're in a very hot location, it's ventilated poorly, a fan has stopped within your estimator, or it's full of grit.

Your computer monitors its own internal temperatures and yous can admission this information. It's generally available in your computer's BIOS, but you can as well view it with system data utilities such as SpeedFan or Speccy. Check your computer'southward recommended temperature level and ensure it's within the appropriate range.

If your estimator is overheating, you may see bug only when you're doing something demanding, such as playing a game that stresses your CPU and graphics card. Be sure to keep an middle on how hot your computer gets when it performs these demanding tasks, not only when it'southward idle.

Stress Test Your CPU

You can employ a utility like Prime95 to stress test your CPU. Such a utility will fore your calculator's CPU to perform calculations without allowing it to rest, working it hard and generating heat. If your CPU is becoming too hot, yous'll start to run into errors or system crashes.

Overclockers apply Prime95 to stress exam their overclock settings — if Prime95 experiences errors, they throttle back on their overclocks to ensure the CPU runs cooler and more stable. It's a good way to check if your CPU is stable under load.

Stress Exam Your Graphics Carte du jour

Your graphics bill of fare can as well be stress tested. For example, if your graphics driver crashes while playing games, the games themselves crash, or y'all run across odd graphical abuse, you can run a graphics benchmark utility like 3DMark. The benchmark will stress your graphics card and, if it's overheating or failing nether load, you lot'll see graphical problems, crashes, or bluish screens while running the benchmark.

If the benchmark seems to piece of work fine but you lot have issues playing a certain game, information technology may just be a problem with that game.

Swap it Out

Not every hardware problem is easy to diagnose. If you have a bad motherboard or ability supply, their problems may merely manifest through occasional odd issues with other components. Information technology'due south hard to tell if these components are causing problems unless you replace them completely.

Ultimately, the best way to determine whether a component is faulty is to swap it out. For example, if you think your graphics card may be causing your computer to blue screen, pull the graphics carte out of your computer and swap in a new graphics card. If everything is working well, it's likely that your previous graphics bill of fare was bad.

This isn't piece of cake for people who don't have boxes of components sitting around, just it's the ideal manner to troubleshoot. Troubleshooting is all about trial and error, and swapping components out allows yous to pivot down which component is actually causing the problem through a procedure of emptying.

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This isn't a complete guide to everything that could likely go wrong and how to identify it — someone could write a full textbook on identifying failing components and still non cover everything. But the tips in a higher place should give you some places to start dealing with the more mutual problems.

Image Credit: Justin Marty on Flickr