Put Through Their Paces

We look at one Windows on-board tool, five free tools, and a commercial tool to discover hardware installed on a Windows computer and determine whether it is still working properly.

Thomas Bär, Frank-Michael Schlede

Anyone looking for software that can be used to explore and check the hardware of a Windows computer could initially be overwhelmed by the sheer number of tools available. In this article, we look at a number of useful tools for this task, but we cannot claim this list is exhaustive because of the sheer number of tools on the market. Instead, we decided to test on-board resources and tools from the Windows environment, the open source community, and commercial programs that provide useful and practical support for controlling and managing hardware under Windows. Windows Offerings Both the older Windows versions from NT 4.0 and the current versions come with the msinfo32 command-line program, which reports a first look of the machine hardware. The program offers a good overview of…

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ADMIN Network & Security (Digital) - 1 Issue, January/February 2025

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