Information about the system in Windows: how to look and why it is needed?

Surely today, any more or less prepared user will easily call the parameters of his computer or information about the system, including the installed "operating system", the type and frequency of the processor, the amount of RAM, disk, etc. But not many know that this is just, So to speak, the surface part of the iceberg. And if you want to know the mode of the DMA channel? What to do then? Now let's talk about how to learn all the parameters in detail.

General information about the system

Many users, of course, can be outraged, they say, what are the bad parameters caused by right-clicking on the computer icon, where you can see the 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, it can see all the "iron" or virtual components that are available in the system, even if they are disabled in the BIOS or those that have problems or conflicts. However, in some cases, you need to have more complete information about the hardware and the software environment in order to identify the causes of failures and eliminate the problems that arise.

System Information: Windows OS Software

In any "operating system" of the Windows family, there is a custom viewer of this type of information, regardless of the version of the system itself.

A lot of various parameters are presented here. Certainly, some of them are not necessary for a regular user in their daily work, but specialists who are engaged in repair or assembly of computer terminals, such information can say a lot. It should be noted that the built-in utility collects information about the system in the background, instantly reacting to the slightest change in configuration at all levels. And this largely makes the "native" Windows utility simply irreplaceable.

How do I view the system parameters data?

Now let's see how you can view information about the system. There are at least three ways to do this in Windows.

The most common method is to use the "Start" menu with the subsequent choice of either utility programs or administrative tools, where the desired partition is located (the difference in location is due to different versions of the "operating system" 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 menu "Run" (Win + R), where the command msinfo32 is prescribed. You can go another way, first by calling the command line (Win + R + cmd), and then entering system info. In principle, exactly how this program will be called, does not play a special role. To whom as it is more convenient.

Main menu components

Now let's look at what's interesting in the "System Information" section. Here are a few basic categories. At once we pay attention to a line of the general information. Here, not only information about the Windows system is indicated, but also a number of parameters associated with it. For example, the version, build, disk layout, bootloader, etc. You can immediately see the current versions of the installed BIOS and SMBIOS, user and geolocation data, information on "RAM" and virtual memory or even the status of the Hyper-V module, if Such is available. Next, the hardware resources section follows. The average user is unlikely to understand what kind of data it is. But the system administrator can easily view some important characteristics for eliminating this or that glitch at the "hardware" level.

Very interesting is the components section. It somewhat resembles the "Device Manager", but the data presented in it are 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 installed codecs and decoders in the system, for network devices - their advanced parameters, for disk drives and controllers - their data, etc. In general, you can learn much more from such information than from the one presented in the The manager. Separately, it is worth paying attention to devices with conflicts (malfunctions). The Windows OS itself can not always represent such information even in the manager, but here for each failed component it can get maximum.

Finally, in the section of the software environment, you can find all the user's information about the drivers, modules, variable environments, installed and automatically downloaded applications and services. And even information about the errors. In obsolete "operating systems", you can find more sections of the browser options - everything that concerns 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 work with either .cab or .xml formats).

Third-party utilities for viewing system information

Among the third-party utilities you can note the most popular programs. It, for example, PC Wizard from the developer CPUID, familiar to many on the utility CPU-Z, 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 for most users in the work will not be particularly useful. But to system administrators, developers of compatible software or simply to specialists engaged in manual assembly or repair, such data will be extremely important. Although some users can also use them. Say, in a situation where you want to manually delete a driver, and use does not know where to look for it.