Live Disc for testing used computers?

[DW in UT]

Anyone have advice about a Linux "Live Disc" to easily test and check specs & components on a used computer when shopping?

My situation is that I like to go to Thrift Shops and Government or School surplus sales, and would love to have a disc to pop in to a cd to boot the computer, since some of the items at these places have had the OS and/or hard drive stripped. (Should be CD based rather than DVD, as many used computers only have cd drives.)

Would be even better if it was something that would boot very fast, and have an instant or easy readout to show:

1. processor type & speed
2. memory
3. hard drive specs
4. optical drives
5. list PCI, AGP and other cards

.. and maybe other specs to help decide if the computer would be a good buy.

Any help greatly appreciated.

(P.S. - I'm not trying to but computers for re-sale. Just to make decent combos available to friends and relatives.)

 

[lxskllr]

I'm more familiar with Windows, so I'd probably use UBCD4Win. It has an XP interface that I'm familiar with, and i know how to find things quickly. It also has the added bonus of being a damned good recovery disc for Windows problems.

 

[heymrdj]

In just carry CPU-Z and Aida32 on a flash drive. Put in, double click exe's, look at readout.

 

[DW in UT]

CPU-Z is great for my purposes, but only if the computer is up and running with a hard drive and an operating system. Not always the case at thrift stores and surplus sales.

Still might work for me on a flash drive, since any computer without a usb port is probably too old to use these days. Will it run off a usb flash drive if the computer is booted with a Ubuntu live disk, or does CPU-Z requires genuine Windows environment?

 

[Kwatt]

Take a look at Knoppix 5.1.0.
It can live run from a CD or SD card with a USB adapter.
Ubuntu tends to hide boot information ala Windows. Knoppix shows a lot of information during boot with some delayed scan pauses that gives more time to read the screen. It shows CPU type and speed, total memory, and other info.

Beside Knoppix is a great repair/utility distribution. It saved me from a lost partition table due to a PS failure on boot a couple of weeks ago.

I carry a CD and the USB/SD card combo in my netbook case at all times.

 

[NoShangriLa]

Chose your weapon Here

In my limited experience with Live CDs a few year ago;

Knoppix hardware drivers is second to none (Knoppix was a base for me to check driver issues with RedHat/Mandrak/Suse/Ubuntu.

Damn Small Linux is my favorite rescue disk.

SUSE Live-Eval CD is quite slick if you like eyes candies (it require a hdd at boot to run but it doesn't installed nor change anything on the hdd). IMHO this is the best distro to use to test the hardware capacity of your potential computer.

Gnoppix is a Gnome version of Knoppix.

Gentoo is an OpenBSD base distro with slightly weaker hardware support than Linux (pretty much any hardware that run under Gentoo it will be supported by Linux).


Good luck!

 

[Ken g6]

A little Googling around turns up that FreeDOS has a utility called compinfo that might do what you want. No, I haven't tried it.

 

[skyking]

Look at all the tools on ultimatebootcd. Some of them should get it done for you.