Rating: - Not realy helpful...
Not realy helpful... Im IT Technical, and try some times to used, but is difficult to read the problem.
Rating: - Great tool
This card is a great shortcut and saves me from looking up what different beeps mean. No technician should be without this tool, but don't rely on it 100%. There is no substitute for experience. As for the probable dork squad employees who say "This tool sucks! It shows my processor as being bad when everything is fine!" CLEARLY have not read the instruction manual where it clearly states FF in one brand of BIOS means CPU/Misc problem, and in another means "Attempt to boot" aka all clear to the MB's knowledge.
Rating: - Great Diagnostics Tool
I have used mine many times on many different PCs and it has never failed me. The book tells me what I need to know to fix the hardware problem.
It even has a PSU tester via the LEDs at the top of the card. Once I had a PC that had a serious power surge go through it and I tested it with this card. The power supply passed the separate PSU tester but failed the PSU test on this card. That told me that the board was fried and power was not getting through it.
I take this with me on every job I do.
It is ONLY a hardware diagnostic tool. It does not do software.
Rating: - Port 80 card
I have used port 80 cards for years for developing device drivers and debugging kernel problems. This particular model has several features which I found useful. The display is on both sides of the board, making it easy to read from any location in the case. The external cable allows the case to be closed and still have access to the display.
I have been using this model for three weeks and it has worked as advertised.
There have been several negative comments about the card. These cards work by displaying the contents of address 80 in the I/O address space. If they are displaying 0xff after booting it is probably because the bios does not use port 80 to display debug information and not due to any fault of the card.
Rating: - Useful for confirming problems, saving time.
I've only used this once trying to determine if I had a bad board or cpu. Unfortunately I think the error code given meant it could be both. In the end it ended up being faulty capacitors on the motherboard. I think this tool would be great for someone who fixes computers everyday. It should save time on swapping out components when ruling out problems. For me it confirmed what I researched and really that is why I bought it. If I would have had it earlier it would've saved me some time.
Home
Electronics : Soyo Computer Inc. SY-TECHAID Tech Aid Debug Card From Soyo
- Not realy helpful...
- Great tool