is there a way for me to check nonworking computer hardwares such as mouse keyboard.

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Posted 26-Aug-13 3:47am

Member 10232851

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Mehdi Gholam 26-Aug-13 9:49am

Check for what?

Joezer BH 26-Aug-13 9:52am

Check for vital signs perhaps :confused:

abbaspirmoradi 26-Aug-13 9:57am

you can check computer harware from this link:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa394587(v=vs.85).aspx

Member 10232851 26-Aug-13 10:15am

I mean, we're working on our thesis using vb.net, is there a way that out system can check if the hardwares on a computer are properly working like mouse, keyboard, monitor etc. thanks though

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Dave Kreskowiak · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-26T04:34:00

Solution 1

Not really. In order to do most tests that would be worth anything, you'd need direct access to the hardware. This is something you don't get in Windows as the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) removes access to the hardware from your application code, simplifying your application.

If you wanted to run tests on the hardware, you'd need to write tests specific for the hardware chipsets in each device. Most of the time, you're not going to get much data back from the chipsets beyond basic information on it working. Chipsets are normally not designed to return much data when stuff doesn't work.

Diagnostic tools are exercisers. They normally feed data to a device and expect some known data to come back when then device is working. The problem codes you get back from the diagnostics are usually some code that means "this particular exercise failed" and how it failed, like "I wrote this data to it and the wrong data came back". You just about never see "this is WHY is failed" because the hardware normally doesn't support such behavior.

Posted 26-Aug-13 4:34am

Dave Kreskowiak

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Member 10232851 26-Aug-13 10:41am

how about a device ? is there a device capable of doing it ?

Dave Kreskowiak 26-Aug-13 11:20am

No, not really. A device is just a hardware implementation of a diagnostic exerciser.

Think about it. The devices are using either standard or custom ICs that can be used in anything at all. Since you have no idea what the chip is going to be used for why would you put the effort into putting diagnostics into the chip (increasing costs!) when there may very well be nobody listening for diagnostic messages??

Mice and keyboards are very simple and cheap devices. There's really nothing to test.

In the case of a mouse, these a small camera and encoder and a USB interface. What are you going to test? Does the camera come back with a usable image? Nope. OK, why? Is it a problem with the camera lens? Is it a problem with the CCD? Is it because there's a piece of tape over the camera hole? Is it because the LED lighting up the surface the camera is looking at isn't working? Is there a problem with the USB interface? Well, if there was, you'd never know it because you're not able to talk to the mouse.

There is only one testable problem in that list as far as the chip in the mouse is concerned.

Member 10232851 26-Aug-13 22:17pm

oh, I see, the reason im askin this is because we are working on a lab monitoring project for a school and what we wanted to do is that when a particular computer unit inside a laboratory is used and some of its hardwares are not working, the problem will automatically be sent to the database and seen by the server. With this, there will be less actions for the students(lab users), and the data sent do the database(problems) would be more accurate(there might be instances where students purposely fill out problems that does not even occur). Before we start our work, i wanted to know first if what we are planning to do is feasible or not. thank you sir for considering and taking time to answer my questions.

Dave Kreskowiak 26-Aug-13 23:34pm

Feasible? Not really. There's really nothing to check on a Keyboard and Mouse and everything else would just bog the system down.

About the only thing you could check for would be the S.M.A.R.T. codes from the hard drives. That's about it.

You can find an example of that at http://www.know24.net/blog/C+WMI+HDD+SMART+Information.aspx

Hard drives are the only thing that generates this kind of data.

Member 10232851 27-Aug-13 8:51am

thanks