Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Hardware is by far the ugliest part of a computer because information on this subject is obscure and difficult to find.

For example, imagine you need to know what kind of RAM is installed or whether or not you have free slots on your motherboard: you’ll have a hard time finding an upgrade. You need a free slot to install new RAM, and you may need to use the same type of RAM on all slots.

Windows has an information tool, to see it press WinKey + R, type msinfo32.exe and press Enter. But the information is not exactly what you are looking for.

The device manager also has a lot of good information but sometimes you may need something more sophisticated.

The information tool is:

Piriform Speccy

This tool gives us the following menu:

Each of these sections is full of content; we are going to see some of them. For example, the Operating System section:

Here you can see the Windows serial number, which is very useful if you are planning to reinstall your Operating system.

The next one  is the CPU section:

Have you ever wonder what class of CPU you are using? The amount of information given is very impressive. You can even know the set of instructions your CPU supports.

Do you want to know how the bus speed has changed over the time? Press the green icon next to the bus speed and you get this:

Now check the RAM section:

With this sort of information, it is easier to know the information you need to buy new or replace hardware. In my case, I have two free slots and my RAM is DDR2 PC2 6400.

We are now to see the Hard Drives section:

Smart is a technology that informs when your hard drive is going to die. Usually you have to rely on BIOS utilities to know the status of your disk.

If you have seen one of these at boot time, my recommendation is to change that drive. As you may see on the image the utility inform about the status of my hard drive is Good.

The utility can publish this information via a URL so you can share it with other people. You can find this on the file menu.

So there you have it, detailed system information at your fingertips!

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