Used laptop testing software
that reads the truth off the machine.
A free, 34 kB portable tool to quickly check real battery health, SSD wear, processor performance, and Windows locks. Runs 14 checks in ~3 minutes with no installation and no account required.
🚀 Run the laptop check
Unzip
Extract the downloaded file to your Desktop or USB drive.
Start the check
Right-click Run-LaptopCheck.bat and choose Run as administrator.
View your report
Wait ~3 minutes while we check your system. Your report will open automatically.
What it checks
Fourteen checks, each one runnable or skippable on its own. Nine read the machine in seconds; three put it under load; two need your eyes and ears.
Battery health
Runs the Windows battery report and compares full-charge against design capacity, with cycle count and chemistry. The number sellers most often get wrong.
Drive health & speed
SMART status, power-on hours, SSD wear percentage, temperature and error counters — then a real read/write test to prove the "SSD" performs like one.
Memory, stick by stick
Size, type, speed, maker and part number per slot, how many slots are free, and whether it is actually running in dual channel — which integrated graphics live on.
Throttle test
Loads every core for 45 seconds and measures how far the clock falls. This is what catches dried-out thermal paste and a dust-clogged fan — the "fast on paper, slow in real life" laptop.
Ownership & locks
Windows activation and licence channel, Azure AD and MDM enrolment, TPM, Secure Boot and BitLocker. Where ex-corporate laptops give themselves away.
Screen & graphics
Graphics chip and driver age, plus the panel's own model and manufacture year from its EDID — a panel much newer than the laptop means the screen was replaced.
Plus: model and firmware build year, processor detail with Windows 11 eligibility, region and keyboard layout (a mismatch often means a grey import), Wi-Fi generation, a memory pattern test, and dead-pixel, keyboard and speaker tests you run by eye and ear.
One app instead of nine
Everything this guide currently sends you off to download or type, gathered in a single pass.
CrystalDiskInfo
SMART health, power-on hours, wear, temperature — read directly instead.
BatteryInfoView
Design vs full-charge capacity, cycles, voltage — no NirSoft download.
CPU-Z
Processor detail and per-stick memory, including part numbers and speeds.
HWiNFO / HWMonitor
Clock behaviour under sustained load, without installing a kernel driver.
dxdiag & msinfo32
Graphics, audio, motherboard, BIOS date and boot mode.
slmgr, dsregcmd, chkdsk
Licence status, corporate enrolment and volume health, explained rather than dumped.
"But will it run what I need?"
A spec sheet does not answer that. The Inspector scores the laptop out of 100 across five uses and names real examples for each.
Gaming inferred
Names titles by what the graphics chip is. Partly measured: a real 3D scene is rendered and timed, which reliably catches a broken driver or a card that does not perform like its name. It cannot rank two healthy laptops, because Windows draws in step with the screen and both hit the same ceiling. So the ranking comes from the chip class, and the report says which of the two it used.
Development
Whether Docker plus an IDE will fit in the RAM, how long builds will take on that core count, and whether an Android emulator is realistic.
Photo & video
1080p editing with proxies, or 4K timelines without them — and whether exports will fall back to the CPU for want of a usable GPU.
Office & multitasking
How many tabs alongside a video call before it starts swapping, and whether a free memory slot would fix it cheaply.
Everyday
Browsing, streaming, documents — weighted for battery health, because portability is the whole point here.
Why it beats a spec lookup
Three inputs are measured, not claimed: real dual-channel status, real drive write speed, real clock drop under load. Those are exactly why two identically-specced laptops perform differently.
Honest about its limits. These are performance classes, not benchmarks — the same chip behaves very differently in a thin chassis with a low power limit. The report says so, and the throttle test is there precisely because the model number is not the whole story.
Measured, or inferred?
You are about to spend real money on someone else's laptop. So the report separates what was actually timed on the machine from what was worked out from the model name — and never presents the second as the first.
✓ Measured on your machine
- Four real jobs, timed — SHA-256 hashing, gzip compression, tokenising with regex, and matrix multiplication. Once on one core, once on all of them, in milliseconds.
- Multitasking slowdown — the same task timed alone, then again with disk and memory load running alongside. The ratio is what "it feels slow with things open" actually means.
- Memory bandwidth — streamed, in GB/s. This is what proves single- vs dual-channel; counting fitted sticks gets it wrong on laptops with one soldered bank.
- Sustained clock — every core loaded for 45 seconds, measuring how far the speed falls.
- Drive throughput, battery capacity ratio, and memory integrity.
≈ Inferred from the specification
- Ranking one working GPU above another. The render test proves the graphics work and keep pace with the screen, but it cannot separate a mid-range chip from a top-end one — the screen refresh rate caps both. Where it finds no fault, the rating falls back to the chip class and says so.
- Which games will run. Drawn from published benchmarks for that class of chip, not from running them here.
- The weightings themselves — how much RAM matters for editing versus gaming. Reasoned, documented, and open to argument.
Same chip, different laptop, different result: a thin chassis with a low power limit lands well below a thick one. That is precisely why the measured numbers above carry more weight than the model number.
The report
One self-contained HTML file. Opens offline, prints to PDF, and works as a negotiating document.
A spec sheet with tick-boxes
Every reading gets a "matches listing" checkbox. Tick what the seller got right; what stays unticked is what you negotiate on.
Plain-language verdicts
Not "Wear 62%" but "half its rated write life is gone — budget for a replacement drive". Each finding says what it means for the price.
Says what it skipped
Skipped checks are listed, not hidden. Silence never reads as a clean bill of health.
Shareable, if you want it. One button uploads the report and gives you a link to send. It is opt-in every single time, with a dialog naming exactly what goes — the serial number and licence details included — because that is not a decision to make on someone's behalf. Shared reports delete themselves after 90 days.
🔐 What it does with your data
Nothing leaves the laptop unless you press Share. No analytics, no account, no telemetry, no background service. The report is written to a file you choose.
It installs no kernel driver either — which is why it reports the CPU's clock drop under load rather than its temperature. Reading package temperature requires a signed driver, and a small free download has no business installing one on a stranger's machine. The clock figure catches the same fault.
It is two small text files. Delete the folder and it is gone — there is no installer, no service and no registry entry to clean up.
Frequently asked questions
Is there free software to test a used laptop?
Yes — this is it. One Windows app covering battery, drive, memory, graphics, licence and thermals, in place of CrystalDiskInfo, BatteryInfoView, CPU-Z, HWiNFO, msinfo32, dxdiag and several commands.
How do I check if a used laptop is good for gaming?
Identify the graphics chip, confirm the memory runs in dual channel, and test whether the CPU holds its clock under load. The Inspector does all three and scores the laptop out of 100 for gaming, naming titles it will and will not run at what settings.
Do I need Administrator to run it?
No, though SSD wear and power-on hours usually need it. It offers to relaunch elevated once and still produces a useful report if you decline — which matters when the laptop is not yours yet.
Will it work on a laptop I do not own?
That is what it is for. It changes nothing, installs nothing, and writes only the report file you ask for.
Does it send my data anywhere?
No. Everything is read on the laptop and saved locally. Nothing is uploaded unless you press Share online and confirm what it contains.
What can it not tell me?
Whether the laptop is stolen, whether there is liquid damage, and whether the BIOS is password-locked — no software inside Windows can see those. Use the physical inspection guide for them, and the browser toolkit for the webcam, microphone and touchscreen.
While you wait
The browser toolkit already tests the screen, keyboard, trackpad, webcam, microphone and speakers — no install, nothing uploaded.