Is BurnInTest OS dependent ?

[eltoro]

Hi,

I'm considering buying BurnInTest for the company.

What I need to know before I do that, is whether one can understand from BurnInTest if a problem is in the hardware or software?

I'm considering the possibility that a problem may exist because of an OS problem and not a faulty hardware.
For example, a serial port may not function because some software running may lock it for its own use. Understanding that this is the problem and not a faulty main board may save me the hassle of replacing the main board (and only then understanding that it's not the problem...). In such case I may decide to reinstall the OS instead (if I won't succeed in finding the guilty software).

Thanks,
eltoro

[David (PassMark)]

In some cases it will be possible to determine directly from BurnInTest if a fault is a hardware fault. In other cases a particular symptom may be caused by several different problems.

In the particular example you described below, BurnInTest will differentiate between a locked serial port and a serial port that doesn’t exist.

Locked serial ports result in the following error,
"COM port is already in use by another program"

Serial ports that the operating system can not detect result in the,
"The requested COM port could not be found"
error message.

In the 2nd case the fault is likely to be a hardware or BIOS configuration problem. In the 1st case it is likely that another application is holding the port open (e.g for a modem or a mouse).

In other cases it can be more difficult to differentiate between device driver bugs and hardware faults. It may be necessary to swap some hardware components in and out of the machine, re-testing between each swap, to locate the fault.

David