How To Test Your PC For Failing Hardware

Good PC ownership is a lot like good car ownership. You do more than just use it, you learn something about how it works. You don’t need to be a PC technician or a mechanic, but you should be able to identify certain signs of trouble so you can get your rig in for maintenance. Unfortunately, checking out your PC for failing hardware isn’t quite as hands-on and easy to do as checking your car for worn tires or dirty oil. Fortunately, you have access to the minds of MakeUseOf.com and a wide web of free tools to test for failing hardware. Or, more appropriately, to check on the health of your hardware.

If you’ve ever opened up your computer, you know there is a lot of hardware in there, a lot of potential points of failure. That’s how pessimists and engineers talk. However, there are certain points which are more prime for failure than others. Those pieces of hardware that either generate heat or have moving parts tend to be the ones that fail most often.

Now that you’re thinking along those lines, you’re probably thinking of fans, hard disk drives, and CPU’s or GPU’s. You’d be correct that those are probably the most common points of failure in a system. RAM also tends to fail too, since it is constantly being written and re-written to, or flashed as they say in the electronics world. Solid-state memory can only handle so many flashes before it begins to fail, and this also applies to solid-state hard drives.