Finding System Information

Sometimes it is necessary to know some information about your computer. For example, if you want to see if your computer meets the requirements of a game or an application. It is also important when deciding whether it is time for an upgrade in memory or processor. Other times you will need to provide pertinent information about your PC to help a technician troubleshoot a problem. I will provide you with multiple places to gather important information about your computer.

One such way is to locate your “My Computer” icon. It will be located on your start menu and/or desktop.  Right-click on My Computer, and select properties.

The system properties (pictured below) will appear, and it shows you the operating system, version, and service pack installed. It also shows you what processor you have and how much RAM is installed in your computer. 

If you click on the Computer Name tab, then it will show the full computer name and the workgroup or domain to which you belong.

Now let’s find out some information about your hard drive(s) and CD/DVD drive(s). Just click on My Computer in the start menu or double click the desktop icon. If you hover your mouse on the hard drive and do not move it for a second, then it will display the amount of free space and the total size of that drive. The DVD drive just shows what is currently in the drive…if nothing was in the drive, then it would show that it is a DVD-RAM drive.

You can also right-click on the drive and click on properties to get a bit more information about the drive.

It appears as though there are 3 hard drives in this computer, but that is not true. For more advanced information about the hard drives we will have to look at the disk management console. Click the start button and then Run.

The following box opens. Type “diskmgmt.msc” without the quotes and hit enter or click okay.

The disk management console will open, and display information about hard drives and CD/DVD drives. You can see below that this computer only has one physical hard drive (Disk 0), but it is broken up into partitions (The operating system treats them as if they are separate drives). If there was another hard drive it would be Disk 1. We see that the main drive is 465GB, it has 3 partitions, and the free space of each partition. There is also only one CD-ROM drive (which has DVD marked right below it), if there was another it would be called CD-ROM 1.

There are some other methods for gathering more advanced information. One is typing dxdiag in the run box (may not work for all computers). This shows system information and if you click on display and sound, then it will show information about your graphics card and sound card.

Another method is to click start, then Run, and type “cmd” in the run box. Then at the command prompt type “systeminfo”. This will bring up an entire list of information about your PC, such as computer name, operating system, memory, etc.

Device manager is another great tool for finding information about your computer. Once again click start, then Run, and type “devmgmt.msc” in the run box. This will give you advanced information about your PC, and by double-clicking an item you can view more information, such as drivers and other options.

Knowing where to find information about your computer can be important and useful. These tools can allow you to hop on most Windows machines (most of these tools work on most versions of windows), and find out the speed of the processor, the amount of memory, the version of the operating system, the size of the hard drive and much more.