101 Ways to Hack your PC

TORTUROUS TESTING
Making sure your system is stable, happy and set up properly.

1
Check your burnt optical discs. Dye fades, discs become unreliable, you may have even had a bad burn. Once a year it’s a good idea to run Nero CD-DVD Speed’s Scandisc, or even better DVDInfoPro’s CRC error test to make sure the entire disc is still accessible.

2
If you’ve found a dud disc, rather than recreate/redownload everything, it’s preferable to recover as much as possible. Head to www.kvipu.com/CDCheck, grab the program and your free licence key after you register. You could also try filerecovery.hostyourself.net/#JFileRecovery if online tools float your boat or if you’re the money paying type, try isobuster.

3
Test your memory to make sure it’s okay. Grab the bootable ISO of Memtest86 from www.memtest86.com and burn it, then restart the PC, boot off CD and let it do its thing. You can also use Microsoft’s tool – for WinXP download it here: oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp. For Windows Vista, just type ‘memory’ into the search panel, execute the Memory Diagnostic Tool and you’ll be given the option to restart and test. If you’re running classic, you’ll find it in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools.

4
If you’re having trouble running your RAM in dual channel at the advertised timings but the sticks work individually, grab CPU-Z from www.cpuid.com, go to the SPD tab and make sure your sticks have the same programmed timings, or there aren’t duplicate frequency tables. If there’s a problem here, this could be the source of your issue.

5
While you’re in CPU-Z, make sure your CPU is running at the correct frequency and has the proper multiplier and bus speed (the CPU tab will tell you).

6
Make sure all your cores are enabled, by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc, then going to the performance tab. Make sure that ‘One Graph Per CPU’ is checked under View -> CPU History. If this is the case, there should be a CPU usage graph for each of your cores. If not, then either ACPI/APIC is not enabled in your BIOS, or the wrong HAL for Windows has been installed. Firstly you’ll need to check that these are enabled in your BIOS – assuming that this won’t start blue-screening your Windows install, there are now two options.
1. The most likely to work – reinstall Windows.
2. The way that requires a bit of hacking around, and may result in a blue screen (perhaps create a System Restore point before you begin, or more extremely a drive image): Go to Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System, click the hardware tab and then the Device Manager button, expand Computer, right click on the device below it (likely ‘ACPI Uniprocessor PC’ or ‘Standard PC’) and choose Properties. Click Update Driver and say ‘No, not this time’ to the Internet prompt, click Next and then select ‘Install from a list or specific location (Advanced)’ and click Next. Select ‘Don’t search, I will choose the driver to install’, click Next and select ‘ACPI Multiprocessor PC’. Click Next and pray that it works.

7
Check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your hard drives with HDTune by selecting the appropriate drive and clicking the Health tab. You may wish to run the Error Scan from here as well.

8
Defrag to squeeze out a bit more speed. Right click on your drive in Explorer, choose Properties, hit the Tools tab and then click ‘Defragment Now’. Alternatively you could use a free trial of Raxco’s PerfectDisk to make the process a bit quicker.

9
Grab HDTach and make sure your hard drives are hitting the speed they should: www.simplisoftware.com. If your hard drive is SATA 3Gb/s capable, make sure it’s jumpered properly to take advantage of this – you may be running at SATA 1.5GB/s without realising. A good indication of this is if your burst speed is about or below 180MB/s.

10
Look for problems. Grab SiSoft Sandra from www.sisoftware.co.uk, run all the benchmarks and make sure your components are performing as they should. Compare to review results online if need be.

11
If you have two onboard network ports, despite both being gigabit one may be going through the PCI bus instead of PCI-E. Sandra’s Buses and Devices application should spill the beans, if you cycle through the adaptors and devices. If this is the case, you want the cable accessing your LAN to be hooked up to the PCI-E port so you lower the potential risk of the PCI bus getting saturated.

12
Download ATITool from www.techpowerup.com/atitool. It supports NVIDIA cards too. If your card isn’t supported, check the beta forum to see if there’s been an update. Run ATITool, and click Scan for Artifacts. If your card is running stably, no artifacts should be detected within the first minute. You can also take advantage of ATITool’s direct overclocking here and Scan for Artifacts to check your new frequency is hunky dory, without the annoyance of NVIDIA’s ‘test’ button for example. ATITool does not currently work in Vista.

13
If you have an NVIDIA GPU/motherboard, download nTune from nvidia.com and run the stability test from the NVIDIA control panel.

14
Grab Stress Prime 2004 (Orthos Beta) from sp2004.fre3.com. If you manage to pass Test 1, things are reasonably stable. If not, it usually crashes the system or gives you a fail before the first test is complete. This is a good tool to check that your CPU/memory overclocks are stable, and should help you find the optimum frequencies reasonably quickly.

15
No need to hold the nozzle right next to the components, dust is light enough that it can be sucked up at a distance. If you’re scared capacitors will be ripped off, you’ll need to disassemble your PC and dust with a very mildly damp cloth. Pay special attention to fans! This should increase airflow. For tricky areas such as finned heatsinks and fans, use compressed canned air with an attachment nozzle.

Some hard drives need jumpers added or removed to be put in 3GB/s mode.