This is a very useful diagnostics and testing tool, used by our in-house engineers to test and diagnose various ranges of Mac.Diagnosing Macs can be both a joy and a pain. As with any electronic devices, a fault could be consistent or intermittent. It could be caused by physical damage or by liquid damage, or it could simply be the degradation or wear and tear of the electrical equipment. Hard drive mechanisms can skip and fail, and on top of all this inconsistency, any Apple product can also have a software fault or glitch.
With many years of experience under out belt, we have some clear diagnostic guidelines that we've outlined to make the process more straight forward. The first of which is to isolate the hardware from the software from the get-go and test them independently.
Hardware should respond more consistently when testing (in most cases), so with a solid test drive to work with, some good applications to trace faults and a set procedure and testing process, your diagnostics process should become much more consistent.
The applications used on this test stick are all freeware, and the OS installed is a fresh copy, initialised in order to install the applications required. But the OS is a copyright of Apple, and is not being sold here. The tool has been created as a centralised and updated option to get started with. The purchase is for a brand new USB-3 stick and its USB extension cable.
| OS and Application Specifications: |
| Mac OS X Version: |
10.11.2 |
| OS System Requirements: |
Compatible with:
• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminium, or Early 2009 or newer)
• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• Mac Mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
At least 2GB of memory and 8.8GB of available disk space required
(speeds and responses can vary depending on the machines USB port speed, and the age of the range) |
| USB Stick Size: |
32GB (USB 3 speeds Read 210MByte/s, Write 75MByte/s. USB 2 speeds will be slower) |
| Testing software Provided: |
• GPU Stressing/Testing
• CPU Stressing/Testing
• Fan RPM speed and testing tool
• Thermal sensor monitoring
• Drive Cloning/Backup
• Live Ram and CPU Usage Graph |
| Built-in/Apple OS Native Tools Used: |
• Console
• Activity Monitor
• Apple Hardware Test (AHT)* |
| Software Recommended Usage Guide Included: |
A recommendation of how to make best use of the tools included, and a list of the software is included |
*Apple Hardware Test is only available on machines earlier than 2013 (AHT was discontinued and replaced by Apple Diagnostics Test (ADT)). It is available via the original disk sets 'Application disk' received with the machine when first sold. Alternatively, with machines shipped with 10.7 or later (without disk sets), it is accessed via the network. In both cases, it is accessed by booting the machine while holding the 'D' key.
Please Note: It is very difficult to re-create the use of a machine from a consumers point of view without actually using it in the exact same way. In some cases, this is required to trace an intermittent fault. But in our experience, these tools have been very helpful at providing a consistent testing basis and bringing out a large percentage of hardware faults.
The 12 month warranty covers the USB stick itself and not the OS or contents of the drive.
