1. What Price Convenience?

We recently received a nice little package from PC-Doctor, Inc., a well-known purveyor of PC diagnostic tools and utilities. In fact, it’s not at all unfair to compare PC-Doctor’s place in the PC diagnostics and repair tools market to that well-known subsidiary of Stanley Supply and Services, Jensen Tools, in the packaged toolkit marketplace. Both companies bundle collections of tools and test equipment, and sell them to specific niche markets. That said, Jensen covers many more niches than PC-Doctor, which targets home and small office PC users and professionals, as well as PC service and support organizations.

The full name of the product we review here is “PC-Doctor Service Center 6”. This kit ships in a small ripstop nylon bag emblazoned with the PC-Doctor name and logo. Its dimensions are 8.5" x 7" x 2.5" (21.6 cm x 17.8 cm x 6.4 cm), and the complete kit weighs 22.5 oz (639 g). Figure 1 shows the proverbial "little black bag" with contents strategically arranged, much like those old photos of fighter planes with their munitions arranged around the airframe. And indeed, PC-Doctor takes the field reasonably well-equipped to shoot, its target being trouble.

The PC Doctor bag includes a small but choice selection of tools and software.

This is what you’ll find inside the PC Doctor Service Center 6 bag:

• A Power-On Self Test (POST) PCI interface card that includes a pair of two-digit seven-segment LED displays to show POST codes while a PC is booting. One display is on the front of the card and the other on the back, which makes it easier to find an angle where you can watch the POST codes as the PC is starting up (or trying to). This POST card also includes separate LED indicators for (from left to right) Reset, Clock, +12V, -12V, +5V, and +3.3V, to check major motherboard status elements and voltages. Similar POST cards, such as the Shentech Star Empery PT063, are available for as little as $5, though you can pay as much as $90 for a dual ISA/PCI POST card with more sophisticated data capture and reporting capabilities. We’d value the PC-Doctor POST card at about $15 based on similar competitive offerings.

• An empty 128 MB USB Flash drive, which is provided as a storage device for files and test results, and also to use when conducting PC-Doctor’s Card Reader Test or its USB Test. You can find 128 MB USB Flash drives for as little as $5 online, but with 1 GB units going for $10 and under these days, why bother buying something with so little storage capacity?

• A USB Flash drive with LEDs and dongle circuitry that PC-Doctor calls “the Multipurpose USB Device” (which we abbreviate as MUD). This 256 MB device not only conveys many key elements of the PC-Doctor test and diagnostic software, it’s also equipped with 3 LEDs (green, yellow and red) that flash to provide status information. In fact, the drive is attached to a plastic card to help you decode status conditions associated with the various LED combinations you’re likely to encounter. Finally, this device must be inserted into the PC upon which PC-Doctor software is running: it’s a dongle that must be present for the software to work. We can’t really put a price on this device because such items aren’t sold on the open market, but we’ll opine about its value later in this review.

• A media box that includes two DVDs and a CD, along with the PC-Doctor owner’s manual (also available in PDF form on the MUD). This includes the PC-Doctor Service Center CD, which includes a complete, bootable suite of PC-Doctor software, plus test CD and DVD media provided to help test the CD and DVD handling capabilities of optical drives on PCs under test or diagnosis. Here again, we’re hard-pressed to put a value on this software, except to observe that other companies in this same business sell complete test suites for between $30 and $150-see, for example, the Professional PC Hardware Diagnostics Troubleshooting Software Suite from PC Diag Inc.

• A power supply tester that features a nice collection of basic PSU testing capabilities. These include a 24-pin adapter that can check the main PSU cable bundle, plus 6-pin and 8-pin blocks that can check 4-pin, 6-pin and 8 pin auxiliary 12V PSU power outputs. You’ll also find a 4-pin Molex tester, a 4-pin floppy drive power tester, and a SATA power tester on this device as well. In fact, we identified this device as a rebranded version of the $15 FrozenCPU ATX 2.0 Power Supply Tester, a favorite device of ours already.

• A set of five loopback adapters to test various types of ports and connections on a PC, including an RJ-45 for network testing (dark blue), a parallel port (red), a 15-pin game port (yellow), a 9-pin serial port (green), and a black audio cable that plugs into the input jack on one end and the microphone jack on the other. Such loopback connectors generally cost $5 to $10 each, for a total cost ranging from $25 to $50.

Please note that omitting the cost of the dongle and its diagnostic, reporting, and security capabilities, the value of the other items in the PC-Doctor kit under review range somewhere between $75 and $300 or so. The real value proposition in any PC diagnostics kit comes from the tests it offers and the diagnostics it provides. We dig into those in detail in the section that follows.