Diagnostics

ASO
ASO is a nice, simple, easy-to-use diagnostic program with a wide variety of tools. There is a reasonable selection of cleaning, optimizing and analysis tools available which are all fairly simple and straight forward. A good all round simple application that could be installed onto a clients computer and remain there for future use by them.

Fresh Diagnose
Basically as the name suggests all it does is allow you to diagnose any problems but not remedy them. The software and hardware information is very detailed but takes quite a bit of knowledge to use effectively. Fresh Diagnose also has a benchmarking feature but this is only available to registered users.

PC Doc Pro 3.5
Not a very impressive diagnostic tool. All it appears to do is scan for and remove invalid links and references. The options available under the “advanced” options tab are very limited and rather simple. The actual number of options available can be counted on one hand, the start up optimizer appears to only search one directory of the registry to find applications and services that start with windows therefore it finds only a select few. The Junk Remover gives no information on what it actually does but as far as I can tell it scans for temporary files which are no longer necessary and gives the option to remove them. The GUI is poorly made but it is quite easy to navigate.

Pc Doctor 4
I didn’t bother with this application as it needed to be downloaded.

Win XP Manager
Not a bad program, it has a number of useful features including a registry cleaner and defragmenter, a wizard to help guide the user through the optimization process as well as giving a small overview of what each component does.

Other diagnostic tools

Super Pi – Stability testing
MemTest – Memory stability and error testing