6. Another Take, A Different Road

Just for grins, we priced out the items that we could in the PC-Doctor Service Center 6 kit, with an eye toward seeking items of comparable value and capability. Table 1 shows what we came up with:

If you factor in a number of other, readily available freeware programs (which we cover in Table 2 a little later on) what Table 1 suggests is that for a cost of between $85 on the low end, and up to $328 on the high end, you can match nearly all of the functionality that the PC-Doctor Service Center 6 delivers, with the possible exceptions of the depth and breadth of video and memory testing that the packaged product provides.

This raises a possibly thorny question: “What price convenience?” It’s inarguable that PC-Doctor puts all of its components together into a usable package at a premium price. If you’re inclined to take the higher-cost road anyway, the difference between $328 and $400 isn’t that great. Mind you, it does leave enough change to purchase a reasonably capable multimeter-like the V&A Auto/Manual Ranging Digital Multimeter with USB Interface (Model VA18B), which can measure all the voltages accurately inside a PC that the FrozenCPU PSU testers only read to within ±0.2V or so.

On the other hand, if you’re inclined to take the lower-cost route, there’s no question that you can get close to matching what you might need PC-Doctor for-not including low-level video and memory testing-for less than 25% of what the Service Center 6 kit will cost you. If you’re on a tight budget and balk at spending $400, you can still put together a reasonable trouble-shooting kit for under $100. We’d recommend Everest Ultimate Edition over the PC-Diagnostics Novice software ourselves, though you can get good results from either package. You’ll also want to grab all the items listed in Table 2 as well, and add them to your toolkit.