Mac diagnostic software prior to purchase of used iMac

[Optimouse^^]

I have been pushing my office to switch to an all Mac network, but they are moving forward cautiously. We are buying (4) used iMacs for a select group of assistants to use as a pilot study of integrating OSX into our work flow; however, the IT staff is concerned about their ability to sufficiently test the hardware before purchasing used Macs. For budgetary reasons we are not going to buy refurbished iMacs.

Does anyone know of utility software that can be run on OSX to diagnose hardware? The software should be able to run tests on all system hardware (i.e. video, hard disk, CPU, etc.) and report out results. Ideally it would be open source, but all recommendations are appreciated.

TIA!

 

[motulist]

It's built into OS X. Start up from the OS X install disk while holding down the option key (iirc) and it goes into Hardware Diagnostic Mode.

 

[Optimouse^^]

Thanks for the info. Just to be clear:

My office has OSX Leopard on disk, but the iMacs all have Tiger on them, and there are no Tiger disks provided with the computers.

Can we just boot off of the Leopard disks, and run the hardware diagnostics, even though Tiger is installed on the machine?

It's built into OS X. Start up from the OS X install disk while holding down the option key (iirc) and it goes into Hardware Diagnostic Mode.