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I’ve been a bit lax the last few days, my birthday was Feb. 29 and it took me a few days to recover, had to make up for 4 years of birthday all at once.

But to return to our regularly scheduled Tech Empire broadcast today we have a review of Aida32. Aida32 is the deprecated (and now FREE) version of Lavalys. It is capable of giving you COMPLETE system information. So complete that I can’t fit it all into one screen shot, so read on for a complete outline of Aida32’s capabilities.

Part 2:

In adition to the wealth of information you can see from the two screenshots above Aida32 has several invaluable plugins. CPUID will give you every spec of information about your CPU though since the software is no longer being updated some of the info is a bit dated.

The Disk Benchmark has no such issues. It will give an excellent speed benchmark on five aspects of your hard drive speed including Linear Read, Quick Linear Read, Random Read, Buffered Read, and Average Access. A great tool to see if your hard dive might be the bottleneck in your system.  You can also preform Write tests on a drive, but doing so will destroy all of the data on the drive, so be very careful with that.

The monitor diagnostics plugin I haven’t found much use for, but it makes your screen flash pretty colors, so that’s something…

The Aida32 network benchmark plugin is the one I use the most. To use it you designate one system as the Master, and one system as the Slave. On the Master PC just click on the Bandwidth tab and click start, then on the Slave PC click on the Bandwidth tab and enter the IP address of the Master network. You will have to forward port 80 to the Master PC from the router it’s behind if it is behind one. Once you have entered the external IP of the Master PC in the box at the bottom of the Bandwidth tab press START and on the client PC it will show you the bandwidth between then two networks in a second by second graph. I’ve used this tool to conclusively demonstrate that the issue was not the server, but the network in several situations and it’s always useful to know your true bandwidth. The screenshot shows a bandwidth test between my laptop and my desktop, both on my home wireless network.

Aida32 can be an absolutely invaluable tool for determing what you have in your PC, or in a PC you’ve inherited, or in a client PC. It can also help you troubleshoot network and hard drive errors. With a small 4mb footprint and no installer Aida32 is protable, and versatile. A must have.