Windows and computer system information
Posted on August 13, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Upgrades, technical support calls, helping someone else understand their computers components; there are plenty of reasons why one would desire to understand more detail about their Windows computer. Of course, a Windows XP computer can show its hardware resources, and similar information, by someone using the System Information selection, under System Tools. However, this interface is not too user friendly, and there are better and faster ways to get needed system data.
PC Wizard 2008 is one such tool that gives a person comprehensive information about their computer. This piece of free software allows a person to do everything from accessing detailed data about their hardware, operating system version, and current Windows updates; to running system benchmarks tests for processor speed and performance. It’s graphical interface is fairly easy to understand.
Upon running PC Wizard 2008, it automatically scans your machine right off the bat. The first screen you will see is a System Summary.
This will give you a high level view of your computer’s contents. This information includes the manufacturer of your computer system, how much RAM memory you have, what brand and model of your video card is, and what revision of Windows you have. This may be enough information for some people’s use. For those of us who require further data, we can dig deeper. Make a note of the selection buttons available on the left hand side of PC Wizard.
In my capacity as a technician, I frequently field questions regarding video cards. PC Wizard 2008 has a good section for scanning your video card, and it will shell out excellent descriptions of your video card’s capabilities. This section inspects your bus card type (AGP and PCI are very common), the amount of the video card’s memory, the graphics processing unit (GPU) type, and DirectX support. The results can be practical for the parent who wonders why their child’s new computer game will only run in an extremely reduced graphics mode. They could compare the results against the side of the retail box, and the manufacturer’s hardware recommendations.
Want to know what a specific process does? Sure you can open up Task Manager, and stop a process you do not recognize. However, PC Wizard 2008 can show you more precise information about running processes on your computer without playing the guessing game.
Click on the Configuration bar on the right side of PC Wizard’s interface. Now click the gear shaped icon to pull up the list of Windows processes. Click on a process, then click on the Driver tab in the lower section. Now you can see much more about who created the process and where it is run from.
Need a hard copy of what is on your computer? PC Wizard offers the options of creating reports from your scanning results. When you click on the small disk icon, you have the option of choosing a category, or a particular selection. You can choose to add detailed information, or not. You can also choose from five output formats like PDF, plain text (TXT), or comma delimited file (CSV, good for Excel users).
This article only scratches the surface of what a computer owner can get out of PC Wizard 2008. One could spend hours playing around with this program to find out of all of the inner workings of their windows computer. This is a useful and practical tool for any Windows computer user to have at their disposal.
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3 Responses to “Windows and computer system information”
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Will this game run on my computer? CanYouRunIt will tell you Says:
[...] is quick and will give you a full summary and detailed analysis of your computer’s hardware system. Once it compares that to the minimum requirements of the game, it will determine whether your [...]
September 21st, 2008 at 5:19 am
Please post your comments/suggestions!
[...] is quick and will give you a full summary and detailed analysis of your computer’s hardware system. Once it compares that to the minimum requirements of the game, it will determine whether your [...]
September 21st, 2008 at 5:19 am
Long back I was using Belarc Advisor, now this look better… thankx
Yeah try out PC Wizard 2008, it’s definitely a very good product.