Device tests

Check your hardware without installing a thing

Your browser already has access to your camera, microphone, keyboard, mouse and screen. So why download a separate utility just to confirm they work? This page gathers the in-browser hardware checks people actually reach for — webcam test, microphone test, keyboard test, mouse test, dead pixel test, screen refresh-rate test, typing speed test, reaction time test, gamepad tester and a full-screen color test. Every one of them runs locally. Nothing leaves your machine.

There are three moments when these come in handy. The first is right before something matters: you've got a video call in two minutes and you want to know the cam and mic are alive, not discover it on stage. The second is buying used gear. A keyboard with a dead row or a monitor with a cluster of stuck pixels is a lot easier to spot in five minutes than to argue about after the cash changes hands. The third is plain troubleshooting — figuring out whether the fault is the device, the cable, the driver, or the app you were blaming.

A quick tour of what each test checks

The webcam test shows a live preview the moment you grant permission, so you can confirm the right camera is selected, the picture's the correct way up, and the lighting isn't washing you out. The microphone test draws a moving level meter as you talk; if the bar jumps when you speak and falls when you stop, the mic is picking up sound. Many people use it to settle the eternal question of whether it's their mic or the other person's that's broken on a call.

The keyboard test lights up each key as you press it, which catches a stuck key, a dead switch, or ghosting where pressing three keys at once drops one. The mouse test registers left, right and middle clicks plus scroll, handy for chasing a double-click that fires on a single press. The gamepad tester reads buttons, triggers and analog sticks straight from the browser's Gamepad API — the fastest way to confirm stick drift, where a stick reports movement while you're not touching it.

On the display side, the dead pixel test and color test flood the screen with solid colors so single bad pixels can't hide against busy content. The refresh-rate test uses the browser's frame timing to report whether your monitor is genuinely running at 60, 120, 144 Hz or higher — useful when a panel is rated for one number but Windows quietly set it to another. And the typing speed test and reaction time test measure you rather than the gear: words per minute, and how many milliseconds pass between a signal and your click.

Local, private, and permission-based

This is worth being clear about because it's the most common worry. The camera and microphone tests need your browser's permission to access those devices — that's a one-tap "Allow" prompt — but the video and audio are processed on your own device and shown back to you. Nothing is recorded, uploaded or sent to a server. Close the tab and it's gone. The keyboard, mouse, screen and gamepad tests don't even need a permission prompt; they just read input events the browser already hands to any web page. No account, no install, no add-ons.

Reading the results without guessing

The display tests are where people most often misread what they see, so two quick rules. A stuck pixel is one that's locked on a color — a bright red, green or blue dot that stays put while the rest of the screen changes. It's getting power but won't switch off, and it sometimes recovers on its own or with software that rapidly cycles colors over the spot. A dead pixel is the opposite: a black dot that stays black on every color, including a pure white field. That's a pixel getting no usable signal, and software won't bring it back. The clean way to tell them apart is to run the dead pixel test through black, white, red, green and blue. If the dot vanishes on some screens, it's stuck. If it's always black, it's dead.

Reaction-time numbers throw people too. A typical human visual reaction lands somewhere around 200–270 milliseconds, so if you see 250 ms, that's normal, not slow. Anything under about 200 ms is genuinely quick, and the low 100s usually means you jumped the gun and clicked early rather than reacting. Run it a handful of times and look at your best few; a single result is mostly noise. For typing speed, casual typists sit near 30–40 words per minute, comfortable touch-typists around 60–70, and accuracy counts as much as raw speed because corrections eat your real-world pace.

One last practical note: if a test shows nothing, the gear isn't always the problem. A camera already in use by another app, a browser permission you denied earlier, or a sleeping Bluetooth controller can all look like a dead device. Quit other apps, re-check the site permission, wake the gamepad with a button press, and try again before you blame the hardware.

Frequently asked questions