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Latest news

21 Jan 2008: 2008 Version 1.83 of PC Wizard has been released which includes new hardware support and improvements

18 Feb 2008: Version 1.44.1 of CPU-Z released featuring latest hardware support.

01 May 2007: Belarc Security Advisor version 7.2n released with latest support for Microsoft Update.

Links:

• PC Wizard
• CPU-Z
• Belarc Advisor

System Information

This section is mainly concerned with software that details your hardware, its configuration, system files, resources and benchmarks. Some of this information is available via Control Panel and standard windows event loggers; but as is often the case, the XP software developers are keen to bury this information so that the average user is unaware of what is actually under the bonnet. This is understandable up to a point because most people want to run applications, and it is only when things go wrong or you maybe want to upgrade that some of the utilities below are of interest.

I have found the System Information utilities listed here useful, because they give me an insight into what applications and program versions I have installed. It is also useful sometimes particularly if you have a problem to be able to report precisely what hardware configuration and driver versions you are running.

PC Wizard

PC Wizard has been going since 1996 although I have only recently come across the latest 2006 version. Not only is it capable of analysing your hardware components it can also detail the main system components, providing a very comprehensive analysis of your PC setup. The main classifications are hardware, configuration, system files, resources and benchmarks. Under hardware all the main components are detailed including Mainboard, Chipset, Processor, Physical Memory, Video Card, Hard Disk, CD and DVD drive, Monitor type, Operating System and Direct X. Configuration details are comprehensive providing further details about the main system software components such as Operating System, Library Dll, Security, Services XP updates and Processes and Threads. In addition there are a number of benchmarks for overall performance, cache, RAM, memory, disk and muti-threading.

CPU-Z

CPU-Z is a freeware package providing details about the main hardware components. In particular the CPU, Cache, Mainboard, Memory and SPD (Serial Presence Detect) details are readily displayed for all the well known PC hardware devices. For example the CPU details for an AMD Athlon XP 1800 include the name (AMD Athlon MP), Package (Socket A), Specification (AMD Athlon XP 1800+), Core Speed (1533.4Mhz), Bus Speed (266.7Mhz) and Clock and Cache details. These details can then be saved in html format for viewing or printout or a text report which includes details of all the hardware registers.
The program comes complete with a batch cache latency computation module.

Belarc Advisor

The Belarc Advisor is quite a useful tool for analysing your software installation. It will tell you the status of your virus protection software and whether your Microsoft update protection is up to date. It lists all the installed hotfixes and tells you which ones are missing. In addition it tells you in a compact format all your installed software applications and the current version being run. By clicking on a particular application it will tell you the location on your disk where this can be found. If you don't recognise an application then this may be a candidate for removal, but be careful and check that it's not an essential component of your system. All in all I have found this a very useful tool which is free for non-commercial use.

PerfMonitor

PerfMonitor is a relatively new product for monitoring the performance of the processor. You can monitor for up to four events in order to identify the performance bottleneck of a system or to monitor for cache miss rate. It is also claimed that this tool allows you to compare different CPU's running the same benchmark.

Everest

Unfortunately, the free home edition has recently been discontinued, with Lavalys (the developers) wanting to concentrate on the commercial network market. This is a bit of a shame for home users because it certainly has been a quick and easy to use product. It may be that you can still find an old version using Google, but of course any old version will not be supported and will not be updated. Therefore, you have the choice of buying one of the commercial products or looking elsewhere, because the average home user cannot normally justify paying out for software that may only be useful on a very irregular basis.