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David Wilson

Imagine being forced to face a webpage festooned with Flash, animation and a spectrum of fancy fonts. Imagine then being hit by a ton of spam, followed by the abrupt and inexplicable demise of your hard drive. 
When it comes to computers, this is my idea of a 'torture test'. But what techies actually mean by the term is something rather different: a trial in which, for once, the machine - not the man - gets the grief. 
Anyone who has required  psychiatric hospital treatment after wrestling with stubborn software or hostile hardware will rejoice at the punishment involved in torture tests, whose official purpose is to gauge the ability of machines to endure extreme conditions. 
The inquisitor may be the manufacturer, a reviewer or just someone like you or me who is simply following orders. He or she subjects the gadget in the firing line to the sort of treatment that would make an S&M aficionado blush. 
So what awful ordeals have these sick minds devised? 
Well, if I  were running the show, I would start gently with a cigarette lighter and  progress to an aluminium baseball bat before finishing the guy off with a shotgun. 
The professionals, of course, have more refined methods. 
The most lenient technique is to force a CPU to work flat out for a long time to evaluate how well the CPU, cooling system and power supply work. This is done through enlisting a program such as Prime95, which allows you to run a torture test until you choose to close the window. 
The inquisitors recommend 24 hours. If a computer survives this first ordeal, the testing starts to  get creative. One physical approach is to take an ounce of coffee with a dash of cream and sugar and pour it right between the G and H keys. 
Why the G and H keys? The answer, presumably, is that they lie at the heart of the keyboard where a spill could trickle to any vital point in the circuitry. 
Another vicious tactic is the meltdown: a two-hour session in a boiling hot oven. Then there is the reverse, known as the deep-freeze. But the most brutal punishment, which must make even the hardiest laptops blanch, is the drop test. 
Seventy per cent of laptop disasters result from falls from tables or unzipped laptop bags.
 Chaim Haas,  a spokesman for Symbol Industrial Design Labs,  said Symbol tested the durability and ruggedness of its latest enterprise mobile computers and portable data terminals so thoroughly  that they could be dropped from two metres once without damage, used in the rain, or tumble 2,000 times from a height of a metre. 
But it is not just laptops  the torturers pick on.
  Christian Stankevitz, who runs the Chicago test lab for Network Computing magazine,  said companies such as America's National Hot Rod  Association  test all electronics, including cameras,  to be fitted on a race car by placing them in a 250-plus degree oven to ensure they will not melt during a race. 
Meanwhile, Glenn Gillen, a communications specialist at Underwriters Laboratories,  a global company that tests products for public safety, says: 'For example, radios and hair dryers are dropped repeatedly onto the floor, heavy metallic balls are dropped onto power strips, projectiles are swung into TV screens, flammable towels are draped over space heaters.' 
Mr Gillen  said telco switching equipment was subjected to earthquakes on a seismic shake table, hurricane-force winds and rain, simulated lightning strikes and extremes in temperature, smoke and pollution. 
'All of this to ensure that the telephone system works in case of natural or man-made catastrophes,' he said. 
To test how aeroplanes respond to catastrophes,  America's Federal Aviation Administration  actually crashes jets, a practice 'near the top of the extreme testing limits', according to Mr Stankevitz. 
Anyway, the point of all this is that next time you feel like taking an axe to your computer,  perhaps  you should be nice, after all. 
On second thoughts, it is just a dumb machine. Go ahead, use the axe. 

Confused by computer jargon? E-mail technopedia@scmp.com with your questions.



Torture test a chance to get your own back