If you’re a computer tech person who assembles new computers everyday or even a consumer who just purchased a new computer, it is important to test the system stability by putting heavy load on system resources. Anyone who has used computers for any period of time will understand the importance of having a stable system. The cost of a hardware failure can be enormous. If you are lucky your data will only become inaccessible while faulty components are replaced. If you’re unlucky you can lose your files completely or have them permanently corrupted. Even if you have good backups, you can still lose days of work returning the PC to its pre-failure state.
Burnintest computer
When I ordered a dedicated server from Softlayer, they too ran a stress test using Passmark BurnInTest to make sure that the server’s hardware are stable before handing the server to me. Passmark BurnInTest is a very good PC reliability and load testing software but it is not free. Here is a free tool called HeavyLoad which you can easily use to test your system stability.

HeavyLoad is intended to stress all resources of a PC (like CPU, RAM, harddisk, network, operating system, etc.) in order to test, if it will run reliable under heavy load. This is useful for testing important file or database servers before using them productively, or just to check if your new PC might get too hot when used intensively.

Download HeavyLoad

To stress your PC or server, HeavyLoad writes a large test-file to the temp folder, it allocates physical and virtual memory and it draws patterns in its window. When you’ve used HeavyLoad, memory will be fragmented and the swap file could become quite large. So you should restart Windows after using HeavyLoad. If HeavyLoad has not been terminated normally because of an unstable PC or operating system, a large test file may be left in one of your temp directories on your PC. You can manually delete the temp file from temporary directory or just run Disk Cleanup.

You should run it as long as you want to test your PC or server, at least several hours. HeavyLoad can run on all Windows platform. Newest version includes features to use multicore processors to full capacity, full support for Windows Server 2008 and some minor changes and improvements.

HeavyLoad is not as powerful as Passmark BurnInTest but it is capable to test the main components on a computer and it’s FREE. It is also portable and you can carry around with you in your USB flash drive. Very handy tool for any computer users.

[ Download HeavyLoad v2.4 ]

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