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If you regularly troubleshoot other people\u2019s PCs then you\u2019ll know that the process usually starts by collecting system information. Which graphics card does it have, for instance? How many network interfaces, which USB controller, what user accounts are there? And whatever it might be.<\/p>\n
You may be able to collect some of this data by browsing the target PC, but life will probably be a lot easier if you have a system information program to collect and present everything in a single place. And few tools provide quite as much data as the free Kiwi System Info<\/a>.<\/p>\n The program certainly doesn\u2019t look like it\u2019s going to tell you very much. It\u2019s a tiny 195KB download, for instance, and unzips to a single executable. This looks like the kind of tool that will tell you your Windows version, total RAM, free hard drive space, and that\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n But the reality is quite different. Kiwi System Info organizes its data into 7 key areas: \u201cHardware Info\u201d, \u201cData Storage\u201d, \u201cMemory\u201d, \u201cSystem Info\u201d, \u201cNetwork\u201d, \u201cUser & Security\u201d and \u201cDeveloper\u201d, and each of these in turn has multiple categories to choose from. So \u201cHardware Info\u201d includes \u201cBIOS\u201d, \u201cPrinter\u201d and \u201cProcessor\u201d, for instance; \u201cData Storage\u201d has \u201cDiskDrive\u201d, \u201cDiskPartition\u201d and \u201cLogicalDisk\u201d; and \u201cSystem Information\u201d gives us \u201cAccount\u201d, \u201cProcess\u201d, \u201cService\u201d and so on. Just select a category and you\u2019ll see a report covering that particular area.<\/p>\n While this sounds great, there is a catch here. Kiwi System Info works by using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to discover and display the information available on the current PC. This is very easy to do, which is why the program can be so small, but the problem is that most WMI data is highly technical, poorly presented, or both. Which doesn\u2019t make for great reports.<\/p>\n When you\u2019re browsing categories, for instance, options like CIMLogicalDeviceCIMDataFile, HeatPipe and PerfRawData_W3SVC_WebService probably aren\u2019t going to mean much to the average user (or even many experts).<\/p>\n And worse still, when you do select a more basic category you\u2019ll often find that its data isn\u2019t presented particularly helpfully. When we clicked \u201cDiskDrive\u201d on our test system, for instance, it listed our drives with their physical IDs rather than drive letters (so \\\\.\\PHYSICALDRIVE1 rather than D:), reported our drive D: capacity as \u201c1000202273280\u2033, and didn\u2019t list the drive space used at all.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t necessarily a fatal problem, though. Look past the occasionally dubious presentation and there\u2019s still lots of useful information here. So if you choose \u201cService\u201d, say, you\u2019ll see all your installed services, their full names, descriptions, short names, the service executable file, its current process ID, whether it can be paused, whether it can interact with the desktop, and more (all of which can be exported as a TXT file with a click). If you\u2019re an experienced PC user, and willing to spend time discovering which areas of the program are helpful, and which really aren\u2019t, then Kiwi System Info<\/a> could prove very helpful.<\/p>\n For simpler and more general troubleshooting, though, you\u2019ll need a regular system information tool, as well — Piriform\u2019s Speccy<\/a>, for instance, delivers a great amount of detail but in a much more readable way.<\/p>\n Photo Credit:<\/strong> Liv friis-larsen<\/a>\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/p>\n If you regularly troubleshoot other people\u2019s PCs then you\u2019ll know that the process usually starts by collecting system information. Which graphics card does it have, for instance? How many network interfaces, which USB controller, what user accounts are there? And whatever it might be. You may be able to collect some of this data by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7429,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7429"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n<\/img><\/a>
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