As we all know, 2001 presented an unnaturally rosy picture of the future, propelled by an unprecedented technological revolution that had brought us to the brink of space and even reasonable extrapolation assured that utopia awaited off-planet.

The blunder I am referring to is, of course, the predictive fault analysis of the AE-235 antenna unit. Granted, HAL was lying, but the fact that the astronauts believed him indicates that they expected this capability of him.

Whereas today, we have virtually no ability to pinpoint existing failures to a single component, let alone future ones. To pull a purely hypothetical example out of thin air, a PC with two internal hard drives and external SATA and USB drives can suddenly start failing with the cursor jerking around the screen and repeated complaints that the UPS is connecting and disconnecting and on reboot claim that there is no boot media until the external (non boot) disk is reconnected. The chicken bones and goat entrails that pass for modern diagnostic tools have suggested maybe a motherboard problem, maybe a hard disk problem, maybe a disk controller, and added that it's so much easier just to throw large sums of money at Intel to replace the lot. Amazing imagination I have, huh?

(I don't think we have any sarcasm-impaired readers, but in any case: )

It's possible to diagnose PCs more accurately than that, but they are prone to having a fault that affects the system generally and makes diagnosis difficult.

I rarely have to look at more than two items to find and fix a fault.

Most of the diagnosis software went from useful to essential to psychic to useless. I don't know precisely why. I had a couple of Norton tools that were the equivalent of a stethoscope and x-ray machine, and then I got one that took half an hour to run and produce useless results. They've never recovered, AFAICT.

You have to get into bigger hardware before you find hardware fault detection and reporting built in. Given the short obsolescence cycle, price wars and consumer demand, I don't think we'll ever see the equivalent in PCs. Some server builds have hardware fault management and reporting, but they're typically 2-3 times the price for equivalent performance and often some limitations (such as prior-generation video ports).