Hands On with the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit

The Microsoft Surface Diagnostic Toolkit is one element of the overall Surface Tools for IT download package.

The Surface Tools for IT download contains six different tools that can be used by IT Pros who have Surface devices deployed in their organizations.

However, I am only going to focus on one of those tools in this gallery - the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit.

To get started visit the Surface Tools for IT page at the Microsoft Download Center.

Click on the bright red Download button to continue forward.

You will now get an overlay on your screen and six programs that you can download from this toolkit. Click/tap the box next to Surface Diagnostic Toolkit and then select Next in the lower right corner of the overlay.

That will start the download of the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit and you will get a prompt to save it or open it. I recommend you save this file to a location you have easy access to for future use. Also, just be aware, this tool has to be run on a functioning device that can boot into Windows.

The Surface Diagnostic Toolkit does not have to be installed so it can be run from a USB flash drive or from the local hard drive as necessary. Just open the zipped archive it is downloaded as and click the SurfaceDiagnosticToolkit.exe to get started.

This toolkit can run up 32 different tests on the following Surface devices.

The tests that are available per device may vary because of the different hardware and capabilities on each one of them.

This gallery will give you an idea of what the testing process looks like on a Surface Book.

Visit the Microsoft Surface Diagnostic Toolkit page at the Windows IT Center to learn more about this package of tests.

Note: Be sure to check out the fifth slide which shows the results of the Windows Update test. Although my Windows Update showed the definition update for Windows Defender it did not show the Intel(R) Watchdog Timer Driver update for some reason. I went ahead and installed it through the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit. Based on some quick research this is something to do with monitoring over clocking of the Intel chipset but it does not appear to be causing any issues after installing it on the Surface Book.