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\f0\fs24 \cf0 Welcome to this TechTool Pro demonstration of the Check Computer test.
Using TechTool Pro often starts with running Check Computer as part of a preventative maintenance
program. Running this test once or twice a month, may identify problems developing in
the background that may not be apparent when operating your Mac. When you find issues early,
its best to correct them before they become so severe it results in data loss, or that
you cannot correct them at all.\ \
When you start TechTool Pro you'll see the main configuration screen, which displays
your Mac with the model and date of manufacture. Drive icons for each drive attached to your
Mac is displayed, and hovering the cursor over a drive icon reveals the drive identifier,
connection type, and volumes on the drive. \f1 \
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\f0 \cf0 Check Computer will queue up 6 diagnostics tests to run on all available drives and volumes.
Feedback from the tests is displayed on the stage as the tests are run.\
The Memory test will exercise and test the available free RAM in your Mac. The Surface
Scan, will check for physical bad blocks on your drives. The SMART Check will test the
built-in hard drive\'a0SMART parameters. Volume Structures, checks attached Macintosh formatted
volumes for directory corruption. This test needs to run off an eDrive or TechTool Pro
DVD, because the main startup volume needs to be unmounted in order to test. Video Memory
will also be checked. And File Structures - which looks for specific file type corruption
on your Mac.\ Some of the individual tests run quickly,
others such as the Surface Scan, which looks at every block on a drive, or the File Structures
test, which looks at many different files types for corruption, take a bit more time,
especially when you're testing multiple drives. Check Computer can run in the background while
you work, however it may be more convenient to fire up before leaving your Mac idle for
a while, say if heading out for lunch or something like that. And you can always see the progress
of your test, and whats left to complete in the main screen, or if you use the 3rd party
software Growl, which is supported by TechTool Pro, you can be notified when each test is
completed.\ So first to run, the 1 minute memory test,
is counting down thru 6 different test patterns to exercise the RAM on this Mac. We'll speed
it up a bit.Next the Video memory test will run. And now the SMART Check will run, it
runs very quickly. When File Structures test runs, it may check thousands of files against
their file types, and you can see the progress of the test as each file is checked. When
files are found that are not conforming to their specs, the path and file name is noted
in the right side pane. And we can see here, that we have found files that are either damaged
or corrupt. After the test is competed, we can select any of the files to attempt to
open them, or they can be moved to a temporary location to restore later from a valid source.\
\pard\pardeftab720\ql\qnatural \cf0 The last test is the Surface Scan. In
the Surface Scan, you can see the total number of blocks on your drive, and the progress
of the test, with an estimate of the time needed to finish the test. If a bad block
is encountered, it will be noted in the right-side window, and if a file resides in the area
of a bad block, the file name will also be noted.\
\ Your drives controller automatically tries
to map out bad blocks as they are encountered, unless the bad block is in a critical area
that cannot be mapped out at the moment, or the bad block table is already full. If this
occurs, TechTool Pro will report the bad block and you will ultimately need to do a reinitialization
of the drive using Apples Disk Utility, then the bad blocks can be mapped out when the
drive is reinitialized. If you discover new bad blocks when running a Surface Scan after
a reinitialization, the drive is probably failing and you should consider replacing
it. If a low level reinitialization fails, this indicates the drive is faulty and needs
to be replaced. Lets shorten up our Surface Scan test to get to our results.\
\ Ok, lets review the results of our check Computer
test. You can see the overall test results in this table here.\
\ First the memory test has passed, so we didn't
identify any defects on the internal RAM on this Mac. And the onboard video RAM passed
too. The SMART Check display shows all the SMART parameters tested on this internal hard
drive passed as well, so the drive is operating as it should. In our results, the Surface
Scan checked over 488 million blocks on this hard drive, and no bad blocks were found,
but blocks where data was previously stored can go bad, so its important to run the surface
scan test on a regular basis. The File Structures test validated over 24 thousand files, and
found 28 files didn't fit their specs correctly, and are likely corrupt. The problem with the
file, the path, and the file name, are noted here, and you can attempt to open the file
by clicking the button in the upper right, however it's unlikely damaged or corrupt file
will open at all.\ \
At the end of your test, you can select Reports here, to view of all the operations that were
run on your Mac, there's numerous way to sort your results, \'a0and you can also click thru
the individual test results to learn more. And those are the tests that TechTool Pro
runs for its\'a0Computer\'a0Check\'a0operation. Again, it's important to be in the habit of
running this suite of tests periodically, say once or twice a month, as part of your
preventative maintenance program, to keep your Mac running at top performance, every
day.\ \
And that's it for now, thanks for viewing!\ }