5. Exploring the PC-Doctor Interface

A quick look at the main tabs in the PC-Doctor GUI will quickly illustrate its operation and capabilities, where the program wins multiple bonus points for a simple, straightforward interface. The Home tab is where the action begins, and where you start navigating to explore the program’s capabilities.

The Home tab shows up by default, providing access to basic system information.

The Diagnostics tab is populated on the left side by device enumeration on your PC. Based on what the software finds, you gain access to all the relevant tests and diagnostics by navigating through categories to specific devices. In the screenshot we’ve captured, we selected the video card in the video category, to show the range of video tests available, which are run automatically against all monitors on a system with more than one display installed.

Though we show the video tests here, you can get to tests for all other system components this program discovers by navigating through the device hierarchy.

Those who’ve worked with device manager will get this approach instantly, and even those who haven’t can find their way around a PC’s devices by inspection and selection.

Any tests that are available through the Diagnostics tab can be invoked and included in a script that the program can generate at your behest. In the screenshot we captured, we picked a couple of items from the System Group. You can also scroll down through the rest of the interface and add elements from the Storage Group, the Video Group, the Communications Group, and the Other Group (FM radio, battery, IEEE 1394, joystick, keyboard, mouse, and other peripherals) with great ease and facility. There’s a Save button to let you name and save such scripts, a Load button to let you call up already defined scripts, and a Run button to fire them off when you’re ready.

The Scripts tab makes it easy to select and include tests to be run, then fire them off at will.

Finally, there’s the System Information tab, where you can dig into the details that PC Doctor extracts for any and all of the devices on your PC. This is a great exploration and information tool, with adjustable levels of detail. By default, the program shows simple details, but crank that level up to advanced and you’ll see lots of information, including hardware IDs, driver data, firmware levels, and a lot more. Our screenshot shows simple details on the Philips optical drive installed in our test system.

System information offers adjustable levels of detail that combine device, driver, firmware and other data into a single viewable list of facts.

All in all, we really liked this part of the tool and found it intuitive to use, and quite informative in terms of what information it provided. You’d have to spelunk around inside a legion of different Device Manager property sheets to access the same data from Windows.