Suggestion: Minimal live setup (for USB/etc)

[Nazosan]

This suggestion is not an immediate thing but merely something to think on for perhaps a later date. Because of the nature of the testing this is primarily aimed for (eg finding the right voltages and frequencies for stability) it occurs to me that it might be beneficial to use a live OS to do this sort of testing -- something where if the PC suddenly reboots without warning there is very little to no risk of damage to filesystems. This also has the benefit of you having full control of the setup (such as ensuring proper permissions.) I'm thinking a simple minimal live Linux setup running a setup with screen or etc to do a split text "window" (with one showing core temperatures and the other the test process) with no partition auto-mounting would probably be relatively easy to setup (though I am certainly no expert.)

Just food for thought. It may perhaps be beyond the scope of this project, but I think it mostly follows along its lines with the current methodology being more or less the same whether batch file or Bash script.

[sp00n]

A Linux distro would be too much, there are quite a few Windows specific routines that I query during the runtime of the script. While PowerShell itself seems to run under various Linux distributions, the Windows specific commands do not. There are probably Linux specific counterparts to them, but I'm not familiar with them.

I absolutely agree that you should do your testing with a Windows environment where it doesn't matter much when it crashes or breaks, I did much of the initial testing on an installation on a spare SSD. What would be interesting would be a Windows live USB that already includes all the relevant tools - .NET, HWiNFO, Fan Control, PBO Tuner, etc. But I think this is out of the scope of this project, I'd have no problem if CoreCycler would be part of such a collection if someone else wanted to do this though.

[Nazosan]

There is a "Windows PE" option for live options, but I think the tricky part there is licensing makes distribution extremely difficult. I have actually seen a few builds available on the Web, but they seemed to be limited to being distributed in forum threads and sketchy sites -- I presume due to licensing or something (no one actually says why.) Probably the easiest to actually track down seems to be the one called "Gandalf's Win10PE" but it still doesn't seem to have an official distribution. I presume the only way it could be distributed to the end users openly is via some sort of automated build script for MS's PE tools (that the user would first have to manually install and provide the necessary files for.) That was the primary reason my first thought was Linux since it's mostly just a matter of finding the equivalent commands and then it could be freely distributed in a final ready-made form legally.

I did think it probably would be out of the scope of this project. Mostly I just wanted to put the idea in the back of the heads of yourself and possibly any others why might stumble upon this as something that might be worth looking into someday. As it is it's easy enough to run Prime95 or y-Cruncher from a live Linux distro, and the sensors command seems to be already in most, if not all distros as a convenient way to read the temperature (well, there may be better ways, but it was simple enough to deal with to do the job for me) but of course your scripts do far more complex things than merely just running a single generic torture test alone. I personally don't know enough to reproduce the effects manually, but I think it can all be done easily enough.

Anyway, food for thought for another time.