Congratulations for choosing Micro-Scope Version 14. This diagnostic is designed for professional-level trouble-shooting of IBM-type personal computers, and has been the choice of technicians worldwide since the first version was introduced several years ago. Although the program is very intuitive and user-friendly, we strongly suggest studying this manual to be sure no useful features are overlooked. This will provide a much improved understanding of how to best use Micro-Scope, and who knows, it might even add to one’s understanding of Personal Computers.
Formed in September 1990, Micro 2000 Inc. was chartered to provide the personal computer industry with professional-quality diagnostic tools, which were virtually non-existent at the time for that segment of the computer industry. As the "personal" computer evolved into the powerful machines of today and became an indispensable fixture in the corporate world, Micro2000 has maintained its position of industry leadership through award-winning technical support and by staying consistently on the cutting edge throughout the rapid advances in PC technology. Meanwhile, our basic philosophy has not changed at all. Whether it is diagnostics, network administration tools or educational and certification courses, our goal has always been to provide our customers with the best state-of-the-art products of their kind available in the world, and always at an affordable price.
Virtually all application programs for the PC are written to run under one of the popular operating systems, most often either DOS or one of the versions of Microsoft Windows. The operating system handles all of the interfacing with the hardware, transferring data on and off the disk, into and out of memory etc. This frees the application (and the user) to concentrate on the tasks that are specific to that application and avoids duplication of the most basic functions from one application to the next. However, when attempting to diagnose the hardware, the buffer provided by the operating system actually becomes a handicap, making it impossible for an application to directly access the various peripherals and motherboard components. The way that we solved this problem with Micro-Scope was to write a bootable operating system that specifically allowed direct control of the hardware, and to include this operating system as an integral part of the diagnostic software. This way, the operating system and the application are focused together on the same task, which is to provide you with the most precise control and most accurate information about the state of the PC’s hardware. An additional benefit of our own bootable operating system on the diskette is that the diagnostic routines can be used on any PC with a CD-ROM drive as a boot device, regardless of the installed operating system. The same comprehensive tool can be used on systems running Windows, DOS, Linux, UNIX, OS/2 and others. This approach of mating an operating system to a complete suite of diagnostic routines had been widely accepted with mainframe computers, but had never been successfully done with personal computers until Micro-Scope was released in 1991. The result was that Micro-Scope immediately became the best-selling diagnostic software package for PCs, and (frequently upgraded) has remained in this position ever since.