1. The Time-consuming And Arduous Task Of Hardware-error Troubleshooting

Whether your PC refuses to boot at all or only crashes sporadically, determining the cause of the error is generally a time-consuming affair-and it can turn out to be an expensive one, too, if users have to pay someone to do it for them. In the enterprise world, not every PC service department has a professional hardware diagnostic kit like the one marketed by Ultra-X. Thus, many service technicians end up having to hunt for the culprit practically "by hand," when in fact hardware defects can be detected and/or pinpointed faster with the help of diagnostic cards. That not only spares the technician a whole lot of headache, but it also eases the burden on the customer's wallet as well. Needless to say, using such a device to diagnose laptop hardware glitches would save both time and money.

No doubt the hardware diagnostics heads at California-based Ultra-X were inspired by the idea of making this boon to desktop PC technicians cheaper for laptop techies. The result of their head-scratching is the P.H.D. MiniPCI: the first hardware utilities tool specifically designed for notebook diagnostics. Incidentally, the P.H.D. in the product's name stands for professional hardware diagnosis.

The P.H.D. MiniPCI diagnostic card comes in a colorful box

The manufacturer boasts that it's the first-ever professional diagnostic card for mobile computers. Reason enough for THG to want to gain a better impression of the card's actual performance.