HARDiNFO Free

When tuning or repairing a computer, one of the most important things is to know your system, its hardware, what it can do and so on. Such information can be found in Windows, but it is scattered all over the operating system. To look at your hardware, you need to go to one place, and to look at your performances, you need to go to another. With HARDiNFO, you can see everything there is to know about your computer from a single interface. It will automatically detect the installed hardware, software, peripherals, and other devices and you can also run certain types of benchmarks.

There are different versions of the software (Enterprise or Professional), but you can also get a free version for personal use. The setup file is over 20 Mb large, so downloading may take an extra minute or two if you are using a slower Internet connection. The installation wizard will prompt for additional information (like an e-mail), but it will not take too long to have the software up and running.

At a first look, there is not much you can do with HARDiNFO's interface, except switch to different view modes. All of your computer's details will be displayed on the main area of the interface. They are all neatly organized by category and they can be accessed via buttons on the left side of the interface. Due to the vast amount of information you can get with this software, the buttons themselves have been organized in different categories, so it will be much easier finding the details you are looking for.

The first series of buttons will display system and hardware related information. After clicking the System Overview button, you will see your computer's general info (manufacturer,chassis type, main board, etc.), the number of hard drives and total disk space, the installed operating system, multimedia devices and others. All of them are displayed in separate boxes on the interface for a better view. For a more detailed look on one of these entries, you can click one of the buttons on the left. The Operating System button will display details on OS configurations, startup, the size of the Registry and more. The same depth of details can also be found for the CPU, motherboard, RAM, controllers and resources. You only have to switch to one of these views by clicking their designated buttons on the left part of the main window.

Device information can be found with the aid of the next set of buttons. You can view information on your monitor and display adapter, disk drives, CD/DVD-ROM drives, network and audio adapters. Each of these can be accessed separately with different buttons. If HARDiNFO is installed on a laptop, it is possible to get information regarding its battery and PCMCIA controller. Each set of details, regardless of category, are neatly displayed in lists or as charts or graphs. The interface itself has a modern look and the choice of colors makes it very comfortable to use.

Besides accessing other categories of information like network, peripherals, running services, processes and drivers, you can run a series of benchmarks, using the last set of buttons. Benchmarks can be started for the CPU, hard disk, CD/DVD-ROM, network, graphics card and memory card. For each type of benchmark, the results will be displayed on a table of contents. If you have performed this process before, you can opt for a visual comparison by clicking the designated button under the table of contents. Alternatively, you can import a set of results from other benchmarking software and compare them with your latest results.