Speccy: an Excellent, System Information Utility for Windows

Apparently, apart from GNU/Linux, there's this whole other operating system called MS Windows :P and I thought that I should write a few articles for the MS Windows users from time to time as well. So, if you use Microsoft windows and searching for a free tool to get advanced system information about your PC, although I'm pretty sure there's a whole bunch of 'em out there, but this one called "Speccy" is an excellent little utility in my experience.

To be honest, even without a dedicated utility, in MS Windows we can easily see the hardware & software related information without much of a hassle when compared to GNU/Linux (although we do have dedicated utilities such as Hardinfo for the GNU/Linux geeks too) but still, after installing something like Speccy makes the whole process much more easy nonetheless.

Main features...

*. It's completely free to begin with. Although the do have two paid versions but when compared with the free version, the only differences are that, they come with online technical support + lets you install the application in more than one computer. Other than that, the free version does not lack any features!.

*. Comes with a very user friendly GUI (although I would've preferred a bit "light" theme, not a huge thing anyway) with to the left side it displays the gathered hardware in Categories and to the right-side it displays the information per individual hardware.

*. Summary:

A "quick summary" of your computer/system which includes the operating system version, CPU, RAM, Motherboard, Graphics, Hard Drives, Optical Drives and Audio Devices.

*. As mentioned before, whenever you click on an individual (say the "CPU" for instance) icon, then it'll display a full information about the hardware such as the Cache, Stepping, Cores, etc.

*. Ability to save the details as Snapshots or save as XML or text files.

*. Few language support.

*. Publish your system information online (what a great way to showoff :D).

Other than all of these features, applications such as these has another great practical usage. For instance, let's say that you just installed MS Windows OS on your PC and don't have the proper driver for the VGA/GPU and don't even know its name.

Then you can install a system information/reporting utility such as Speccy and by using it, you will (most of the time) be able to know which GPU that you have (or any other installed hardware in that case) so you could find the appropriate drives with ease. If you wanna give it a try, get it from this Speccy download page. Good luck.