PC-Doctor Toolbox vs smartmontools

PC-Doctor Toolbox monitors Windows PC health and provides hardware diagnostics, system information, history, troubleshooting, and monitoring tools. Its library contains more than 300 tests for storage, audio, graphics, networking, memory, CPU, systemboard, and peripherals. The My Device Dashboard shows overall health, alerts, and real-time system metrics; users can also run Quick or Full Scans and use a Blue Screen Troubleshooter.

System History tracks hardware scans, system changes, unexpected shutdowns, restore points, and application crashes. Toolbox Remote provides a cloud dashboard for monitoring Toolbox-equipped PCs remotely, including test results, blue screens, crash events, and system details. Security monitoring checks whether antivirus solutions are enabled and up to date, while Windows monitoring includes update settings, last check time, and recently installed updates. The product page lists support for Windows 10 and Windows 11 64-bit. Free personal use covers up to five systems, but requires a Toolbox Remote account and opting in to technical and interaction data sharing with PC-Doctor. The product supports multiple languages, including English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

smartmontools is a free package containing smartctl and smartd for controlling and monitoring storage devices through SMART. It supports ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS, and NVMe disks, as well as SCSI/SAS tape devices. smartctl can report SMART health status, show capabilities such as error logging and offline surface scanning, display vendor-specific attributes, start device self-tests, and read their logs. A failing health status can mean a device has failed or predicts failure within 24 hours. smartd periodically monitors SMART status, error and self-test logs, and attribute changes; it can schedule tests and report errors and attribute changes to syslog. It also supports warning emails and executable commands. The project says it should run on modern Linux, BSD variants, macOS, Solaris, Windows, Cygwin, OS/2, eComStation, and QNX systems, and can run from various Live CDs and DVDs. The package uses the GNU GPL Version 2 license and was originally derived from the Linux smartsuite package. Its capabilities focus on SMART health reporting, testing, and ongoing monitoring.