Surely today, any more or less trained user will easily name the parameters of his computer or information about the system, including the installed “OS”, type and frequency of the processor, the amount of RAM, disk, etc. But not many people know that this is just the surface part of the iceberg, so to speak. And if you want to know the operating mode of the DMA channel? What to do then? Now let's talk about how to find out all the parameters in detail.
System Overview
Many users, of course, may be outraged, they say, what are the bad parameters caused by right-clicking on the computer icon, where you can view basic information on your terminal or laptop?
The answer lies in the question itself. The information presented in this section is very superficial and does not give a complete picture of the configuration.
The same goes for the standard “Device Manager”. Of course, in it you can see all the “hardware” or virtual components available in the system, even if disabled in the BIOS or those in which there are problems or conflicts. However, in some cases, to identify the causes of failures and eliminate problems that arise, you need to have more complete information about both the hardware and the software environment.
System Information: Windows OS Program
In any "OS" of the Windows family has its own means of viewing this type of information , regardless of the version of the system itself.
Here are a lot of various parameters. Of course, some of them are not needed by an ordinary user in everyday work, but specialists who are involved in repairing or assembling computer terminals can say a lot of this information. It should be noted that the built-in utility collects information about the system in the background, instantly responding to the slightest configuration change at all levels. And this largely makes the "native" Windows utility simply irreplaceable.
How to view system parameter data?
Now let's see how you can view information about the system. There are at least three ways to do this on Windows.
The most common method is to use the Start menu with the subsequent selection of either utilities or administration tools, where the desired section is located (the difference in location is due to different versions of the OS itself).
The second and third methods are also simple. But many users either forget about them or simply do not know about them. You can use the Run menu (Win + R), where the msinfo32 command is written. You can go the other way, first calling the command line (Win + R + cmd), and then entering system info. In principle, how exactly this program will be called does not play a special role. To whom it is more convenient.
The main components of the menu
Now we will consider what interesting can be found in the "System Information" section. Here are a few basic categories. Immediately pay attention to the line of general information. Here you can find not only information about the Windows system, but also many parameters related to it. For example, version, assembly, placement on disk, bootloader, etc. Here you can also view current versions of installed BIOS and SMBIOS, user and geolocation data, information on the RAM and virtual memory, or even on the state of the Hyper-V module, if there is one. Next up is the hardware resource section. The average user is unlikely to understand what this data is. But the system administrator will easily be able to view some important characteristics to eliminate this or that malfunction at the hardware level.
Very interesting is the component section. It somewhat resembles the “Device Manager”, but the data presented in it is more detailed. After all, here you can see not only the name of the component, but information about the driver files. In addition, for multimedia, all codecs and decoders installed in the system are indicated, for network devices - their advanced parameters, for disk drives and controllers - their information, etc. In general, much more can be learned from such information than from that presented in dispatcher. We should also pay attention to devices with conflicts (malfunctions). Windows OS itself can not always provide such information even in the dispatcher, but here for each failed component you can get the maximum.
Finally, in the section of the software environment, you can find all the data of interest to the user about drivers, modules, variable environments, installed and automatically loaded applications and services. And even error information. In obsolete "OSes" you can also find sections of the browser settings - everything that relates to the Internet or installed Office components. In general, as they say, there is enough information. But few people know that in the environment of this program you can view the parameters of remote computer terminals or save information about the system in a single text file with the extension .nfo (the program can also work with .cab or .xml formats).
Third-party utilities for viewing system information
Among third-party utilities, the most popular programs can be noted. This is, for example, a PC Wizard from a CPUID developer, familiar to many from the CPU-Z utility, or small applications like SIW, System Spec, FreeSysInfo, etc.
Often they have interesting functions related to setting up or testing equipment, which makes them very popular in their field.
Conclusion
In general, it can be noted that information about the system is not particularly useful to most users in their work. But here system administrators, developers of compatible software, or simply specialists involved in manual assembly or repair, such data will be extremely important. Although some users can also come in handy. Say, in a situation where you want to manually remove the driver, but the user does not know where to look for it.