Hi guys. This is a pretty broad question, but bear with me. It doesn't relate a lot to a specific issue as it does with me seeking opinions of my fellow I.T. professionals for assistance in troubleshooting hardware problems.
I work at a help desk for a medium sized but fast growing business. We get a variety of calls, and of course we have our methodologies for fixing them, based on a combination of logical problem solving skills, experience, computer knowledge, and luck. But the one thing that always, ALWAYS trips us up and we never really get any further on is computer hardware crashes and slowness.
For the most part, when someone issues a complaint like "my computer is crashing a lot" or "my computer is too slow", we usually do one of a few things:
1) We try to stress test the computer by asking the user to help us recreate the crash conditions, while monitoring Windows Task Manager.
2) We run the diagnostics CDs that come with our computers. We're a Dell shop around here, so we have diagnostic CDs that Dell always includes with the new PCs we purchase.
With issue 1), we can rarely recreate the exact conditions, and Task Manager usually doesn't show any significant spike in memory usage or processor usage.
With issue 2), we are rapidly losing faith in those diagnostic CDs. We *see* problems, but the diagnostics usually come up pretty clean. I think maybe once in my time here I have seen those help, and that was diagnosing bad memory that was preventing us from installing Windows.
So here are the questions, I guess, that I'm asking.
1) Are there any general tips and tricks you can give us for looking at performance problems?
2) Does anyone know of any decent sorts of advanced diagnostic software we could invest in? While I'm sure I could make a case to spend money on the right program, anything we could evaluate on a trial basis first would be much better.
Thanks for any input, and sorry if this question flies all over the place without a clear focus.
Start Free Trial
