When you buy a computer or assemble a new one you need to make sure that the machine you’ve just bought will withstand the rigors of daily use. Because durability is hard to measure, the only way to find out about initial durability is by stress testing the machine.
To be clear, stress testing will not give you an indication of the machine’s total durability. What it will do is to give you is proof of initial reliability. Lemon units will have a bigger chance of breaking down during a stress test and this is what you can identify when you test your machine. Here’s how you’ll go about stress testing your computer.
First, download a stress testing program for computers. You can opt to use a paid application if you have the budget for it but there are also programs that can be downloaded and used for free. Some of the more popular stress testing software are IntelBurnTest, PassMark, and CPUBurn. With so many stress testing software out there, you might get overwhelmed over the amount of choices. To help you narrow down your choice, go online and read reviews and recommendations from other users.
After you’ve chosen and downloaded the program you want to use, install it on your target computer and run the application. Before you run the application’s stress test feature, you have to configure the settings first. One of the settings changes you may need to do is to choose what kind of test you want to do. There are some applications that also has a feature to test the RAM and the CPU. These tests are designed to find out how fast and how reliable these parts are. Of course, other tests are also available that you may want to conduct as well as part of the stress test run. You should also choose the drive you want to test. This is fairly straightforward – all you need to do is to check the drives. Choose the kind of results you want to appear after the stress test has been made.
Now run the program and allow the application to run the stress test. Make sure that the computer is being properly ventilated because the computer will surely heat up. Also look out for pop up messages that may appear during the course of the run. These error messages could indicate some problem with your computer and you should take note of this so you can address it afterwards.
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