For refurbishers and resellers
Every machine passes a spec sheet. Not every machine passes ten minutes.
A wiped drive and a clean chassis do not tell you whether the cooling still works. This runs in the browser you already opened to test the keyboard, takes about 3½ minutes, and ends in a link you can put in the listing.
What the report tells you
Three figures, each with its reading.
Settled level
%
What the processor still holds at the end against what it opened with. This is the number that separates a machine worth refurbishing from one worth stripping for parts.
Curve shape
shape
A clean step is a factory power limit and is fine. A steady slide on a machine that should not slide is dried paste or a clogged fan, which is an hour of work and a large gain in value.
Run-to-run agreement
±%
Run it twice. Two runs that agree describe a stable machine; two that disagree describe one with a fault that comes and goes, which is the kind that comes back as a return.
The diagnosis
The shape of the curve, read for your case.
01Holds almost flat
Cooling is doing its job. List it, attach the report, and price it as the good machine it is instead of discounting it to cover a doubt you cannot answer.
02Slides steadily from the first minute
Heat is winning before the chip is even warm. Paste and a fan clean-out usually recover most of it. Re-run afterwards and the two curves are your before and after.
03Falls off a cliff, then recovers, then falls again
The machine is cycling against a limit it cannot hold. On a laptop this is often a failing fan bearing or a blocked exhaust, and it is the single most common cause of a returned unit.
Every class comes with a stated confidence and the measurement’s own noise floor. How the shape is read
Where a browser stops
What it cannot tell you.
- No battery health: the browser is told roughly how full a battery is, never how many cycles it has done or what it once held. Read that from the machine's own report before you list.
- No drive health: SMART attributes are invisible to a web page. A wiped drive with 40,000 hours on it looks exactly like a new one here.
- No serial, no exact model, no proof of which machine ran the test: the report describes a machine, and cannot testify that it was this one.
Which run
Deep, 8 minutes.
You are deciding whether to put your name on this machine. The deep run holds the processor for three minutes, which is long enough for tired cooling to show itself; the standard run is often not.
Both kinds are free. The choice is on the set-up screen.
Questions
Asked in these words.
- Can I run this on every machine that comes through?
- Yes. There is nothing to install, nothing to uninstall afterwards, and no account, so it does not add a step to the wipe-and-reimage routine. Open the browser, run it, and the machine you hand over is exactly as you imaged it.
- Does a good result actually help me sell?
- It changes what the listing is arguing about. “Runs great” is a claim; a report a buyer can open on their own phone and read for themselves is evidence. It is most valuable on the machines that are genuinely good, which are the ones currently being priced as though they might not be.
- What should I do about a machine that fails?
- Look at the shape before you write it off. A steady slide is usually thermal paste and dust, which is cheap to fix and turns a marginal unit into a good one. A sawtooth or a cliff is a cooling fault, and those are worth diagnosing before you spend money on parts.