so I have an HP nw8440, and a asus g73jh

[Midknyte]

You would only use the Windows Diags if you are testing external USB hard drives.

figured having no free space on the c partition (just enough to hold the OS) was a bad idea,

It's always better to give the OS a lot of free space. Remember you need to allocate space for things like the pagefile and hibernation file.

You should have run the diags BEFORE your reinstalled Windows.

[satch4684]

yep, I realized it was a bad idea and the cause of many errors probably, I had pretty much zero space on the c drive, so that is fixed now.

You should have run the diags BEFORE your reinstalled Windows.

yeah i see what you mean now :\ but i found the correct software for WD Blue notebook HDD, and the correct model # came up. at least I can say it did successfully pass both tests, this and having no errors after allocating the appropriate amount of memory to the C drive gives me some faith in it.