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AMIDiag Suite is a complete hardware diagnostics package, which I
had a lot of fun testing. I have always loved dinking with utilities and diagnostics
programs. That is where I fed my fascination and also learned the most in the early days of DOS and
Windows 3.1. AMIDiag Suite includes both AMIDiag 6.11 for DOS as well as the brand new AMIDiag for
Windows. No such software will ever be 100% perfect, but this is probably the most
reliable available
today. |
Company Info:
American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) is probably best known for their AMI BIOS, but
also provides RAID controllers, motherboards, system management utilities and more to over 55 percent of today’s
high-tech manufacturers.
Installation
Installation was pretty
simple with the option to install the DOS or Windows versions of the software.
The Windows version was a NO brainer. If you read the Quick Start Guide or
readme.txt on the CD, you should have no problem with the DOS version. There are
four methods of installation that you can choose from.
1) Install AMIDiag to a hard disk
2) Install AMIDiag to a hard disk and create a bootable floppy to run directly from this installation. (This is the most direct way to run AMIDiag on a Windows ME system.)
3) Create a bootable floppy to run AMIDiag directly from the CDROM. (The
floppy is created with your CDROM drivers installed.)
4) Create two AMIDiag floppy diskettes. (This is useful you cannot access
your drives or need quick access to the program on another machine.)
NOTE: Windows NT and Windows 2000 will not make bootable floppies.
This is because neither of the two operating systems have the underlying DOS
layer that is present in Windows 95/98/ME.
Only a few minor hitches with installation...When I clicked on the "Install AMIDiag for Windows" option and...nothing. All of the other
buttons worked fine. I just ran setup from within the Win folder on the CD. I
was in the process of organizing and backing up my data for the big
reformat I had been putting off. I keep a lean and mean machine, but after so
many hard drive upgrades using Drive Copy, the bloated OS just wasn't the same.
So I put the blame on my machine, especially when I then installed the program
on my laptop, it worked just fine. That's it...I'm doing the big F's to my hard
drive. It's time to try the install again. This time when I clicked on the "Install AMIDiag for Windows" option,
it came back with an error message stating there was not enough room on drive C:
to install! Once again I ran setup from the Win folder with no problem. Possible
bug in the menu setup?
During installation, I was given the option to select where the
program shortcut would be placed in the Start Menu. I like this, since I have my
own organizational setup rather than having the typical bloated and unproductive
Start Menu. I chose my Utilities folder, and yet it
ignored my reply and added it's own folder. Yes, these are just little things
that I can deal with, however, I would have thought any beta testing would have
eliminated these minor glitches. I'm sure a future update will.
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The Package
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