It is always useful to find details about the hardware, system components, and installed software on your computer. In Windows 10, there are a number of built-in solutions which allow the user to see system information in a useful way.
Advertisеment
Windows 10 offers the user a number of ways to get information about the operating system. Some of them were inherited from previous versions of Windows, some are new to Windows 10 thanks to new tools introduced in this OS. So, you can learn a lot about your computer without using third party software.
Table of contents.
System Information (msinfo32)
To See System Information in Windows 10, you can start with the msinfo32.exe app, known as "System Information". It is a classic tool which is included since Windows 95. It shows a rich collection of various parameters of Windows 10.
To open the System Information app, press the Win+R shortcut keys to open the Run dialog.
In the Run box, type or copy-paste the following text:
msinfo32
Now hit the Enter key to open System Information.
The user interface of the app consists of two panels. The left panel is a navigation tree which allows you to browse various categories the information is arranged in. The main categories are as follows:
System Summary. Here you'll find general information about your computer system. It includes the Windows version, its installation directory, the amount of RAM and the size of the swap file and many other interesting parameters.
Hardware Resources contains a number of technical details like interrupt requests (IRQs), input/output (I/O) addresses, and memory addresses.
Components shows details about the OS configuration and parameters related to peripheral devices, USB devices, and motherboard ports.
Software Environment displays information about drivers, running services, defined environment variables, and so on.
The systeminfo console app
Systeminfo is console app bundled with Windows 10. It can be a good alternative to msinfo32. It prints a lot of useful information at the command prompt including the computer's name, the installed operating system details, CPU information, the operating system uptime, and so on. To launch it, open a new command prompt and type
systeminfo
The Settings app
You can also use Settings to retrieve some information about the operating system you are running. Settings is a new app in Windows 10 which was introduced in Windows 8 as a classic Control Panel alternative. Here is how.
Open Settings and Go to System - About. On that page, you'll find information about the installed CPU, RAM, the operating system edition and bitness.
Classic Control Panel
One of the applets available in the classic Control Panel app can be used to see some details about the installed operating system. Open Control Panel and go to Control Panel\System and Security\System. Under System on the right, you'll find mostly the same details that you see in Settings.
That's it. Of course, third-party apps like AIDA64 can be far more useful than the built-in Windows tools. If you are familiar with WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and scripting, you could extract tons of information about your system. However, the built-in apps are good enough when you are not able to install any additional software but still need to inspect the configuration of a computer.
Support us
Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:
If you like this article, please share it using the buttons below. It won't take a lot from you, but it will help us grow. Thanks for your support!
Advertisеment
Thanks for the pointers.