A simple question about laptops

[NickFury]

I work a company that refurbishes old computers and resells them, mainly Point of sales computers though. In about a week well be getting 250 - 300 laptops. These range from older (540 MB HD, 8MB RAM) to relatively new ( IBM T23 Notebook, 30 gb HD 256ram )

My question is what would be the easiest and fastest way to test these, they all are going to come with wiped drives. Is it possible to do a quick diagnostics scan w/o separately installing windows onto each one, which can take around an hour a piece.

 

[brady]

Are you looking for a bootable tool that will basically tell you what the machines specs are?

 

[NickFury]

Yah that would help some. Im also looking for something that tests the devices (cd rom, sound card, floppy drive, etc.) are working properly.

 

[brady]

Ok... Let me see what I can find.

In the past we have used private applications to do this.
Let me see what I can find.

 

[NickFury]

thanks that would help a lot, the only easy and fast way i can think of right now is loading one Hard drive with XP pro and just swap it into each unit.

 

[Jason S]

Look around for the Ultimate Boot CD, it has a few diagnostic tools that are free to use, doesn't require an OS.

 

[HAVOC]

thanks that would help a lot, the only easy and fast way i can think of right now is loading one Hard drive with XP pro and just swap it into each unit.

That's not going to work. The reasons are far to complex to explain in this thread. But, believe me you can't install windows on a HDD in one PC, with all of that PC's hardware drivers... remove that HDD and install it into another PC and have it boot to windows successfully.

UNLESS.... Every single PC was exactly the same, hardware, bios, CMOS settings, device drivers... everything....

So i'll save you the time of trying it.