I’ve been given a PC which I was told didn’t work. I’ve connected it up today and it appears to work fine but I was told something was wrong with the HDD. Seems to be ok but what sort of things can I do to give it a thorough check?

Crap put this in the wrong forum!

There are several programmes you can download to test various parts of the machine. For example ‘Prime 95’ is a processor stress test, so if there is anything wrong with the processor then it will crash.

That said, if the machine boots into it’s OS, then i’d suggest it’s fine. I’d Keep using it until you see some symptoms of trouble that you can diagnose.

Could be the hard disc is on its last legs. Try running a check disc it won’t fix it but make it workable for longer so that you clone the HDD.

I was told there was a problem with the hard drive but it seems ok. I’ll try that check disk thing.

Don’t have a keyboard at the moment which is holding things back!

Off-hand I wouldn’t install any ‘diagnostic programs’ as half are shite spamming you into buy a full product (not all, but most good ones are a bit intense). Off-hand I’ve open it up and clean the dust out, concentrating on fans/heatsinks and the PSU… a can of compressed air is best for this IME (compressors can be a bit to fierce, again IME 😳 )
Then run it up and run scandisk (error-checking as per the link in Craigs post), and then go look for the results, if it reports bad sectors, the disc is on it’s way out (not overnight but probably the source of the issues).
I’d also get it fully patched up with the Windows update tool, and leave it running for a couple of hours, to see if it crashes..

Burn Seagate seatools ISO to disc and boot from CD, run the full test.

I would just use it and make sure you have any important stuff backed up.
you can run this too http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

Can’t imagine there will be much to back up on a PC you’ve just been given…