As part of getting some old PC’s ready for eBay, I wanted to run some thorough diagnostics on them. In particular, I wanted to test disks and memory.

Most hard drive manufacturers provide diagnostics specific to their drives on their web sites, but memory is another matter.

I’ve been using Memtest86 to do memory testing. I used it before I switched to using a Mac, and was happy to find that it’s still out there. It’s a nice GPL’d package which you can run from the bootable CDROM image provided on its web site or from a DOS floppy. Pop it in, reboot and let it sit for a while and it’ll very thoroughly test your memory in your PC.

I wonder if it boots on an Intel Mac (with the firmware update that brings BIOS compatibility)?

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