Full Checkup
Nine tests, one at a time, ending in a report card you can print. Written for the person buying the machine — run it on the seller's laptop before the money moves, or on your own before an RMA. Everything happens in this browser and nothing is uploaded.
What this covers
Nine things you can only find out by trying them: the screen (dead pixels, colour and backlight, refresh rate), the input hardware (keyboard, mouse or trackpad, touchscreen) and the camera and sound. Each step opens the relevant test with a bar at the bottom of the page asking one question. Answer Works, Problem or Skip and it takes you to the next one. Ten minutes end to end.
Nothing recorded on this device yet.
Report card
Asserted by whoever ran the test
Someone looked at the screen and pressed a button. These are judgements, not measurements — which is exactly why they are kept apart from the block below.
Read from this machine
Nothing here is anyone's opinion. The browser reported it, or the page measured it.
Printed from hardwarecheckup.com. The verdicts above were recorded in this browser on this device and are stored nowhere else.
Checking a second-hand machine before you pay
A used laptop has a small number of faults that are expensive, common, and invisible in a photograph. A dead pixel or a bright patch of backlight bleed is one of them. A keyboard with a doubling key is another — you will notice it within a day and be unable to prove it was there when you bought it. Neither shows up in a listing, and neither is something a seller usually hides on purpose: most people genuinely do not know.
That is what the sequence here is for. It goes screen first, on purpose: a panel fault is the most expensive thing to be wrong and the hardest thing to argue about once you have driven home. Then the parts your hands are on every day, then the camera and speakers, which are the least likely to have been tested by the seller and the easiest to live without if they are not perfect.
Ask before you start whether you can plug in a mouse and a pair of headphones, and give yourself ten minutes in a spot where you can see the screen without glare. If the seller will not give you ten minutes with the machine, that is itself the result of the test.
Why a seller's own report proves nothing
You can find printable "certificates" that a seller fills in themselves. They are worth exactly what it costs to tick nine boxes. The card this page prints is different in one specific way: it separates what a person asserted from what the machine reported, and it labels both. The resolution, the browser, the CPU core count and the measured refresh rate are read out of the machine in front of you. The verdicts are somebody's judgement, and the card says so in as many words. Run it yourself, on the machine, and the human half becomes your judgement rather than a stranger's.
What this cannot tell you
A browser cannot see inside the machine, and no page that says otherwise is being straight with you. It cannot report battery health — the Battery Status API exposes the current charge as a fraction of the battery's present capacity, so a battery worn down to half its original life still reads 100% when full. It cannot check the storage drive's health, its SMART data, or how many hours it has run. It cannot tell you whether the machine thermally throttles under load, which is the single most common fault in a heavily used laptop, or whether the fans are packed with dust. And it cannot see a swollen battery, a cracked hinge or a liquid-damage sticker.
For those, do the physical checks: open and close the lid a few times, press on the palm rest and look for a bulge underneath, run something demanding for ten minutes and listen to the fans, and — on the machine's own operating system, not in a browser — look up the battery cycle count and the drive's SMART status.
How the record is kept
Your answers live in this browser's local storage under a single key, on this device, and nowhere else. There is no account, no sync and no upload; clearing your browser data clears the run. Because of that, run the checkup on a browser you can come back to — if you check a laptop on the seller's machine, print the card before you close the lid.
