I was just able to check out the latest beta of Speccy from the makers of CCleaner which we have covered here. Speccy gives you an awesome amount of advanced system information about your PC from a tiny portable application. I downloaded the application from here.

It is available in both a portable and an installable version. I choose the portable version as usual so I could through it on my memory stick. The 1.3MB download came in quickly and it was up and running on my machine rather quickly. I was amazed at the amount of advanced system information it showed me right on the first screen.

On the summary page for my machine which you see below, you see it shows your operating system, CPU type, model, speed and temperature along with the architecture type, your memory or RAM amount and type, your motherboard make and chipset, graphics card information, hard drives, optical drives and audio information. It will show you everything you ever needed to know about your system and then some!

You might think that you would never need this much information about your system as a casual everyday user.But you would be wrong. This information is gathered for you in an easy to get to place and could help you in repairing your machine or even creating a detailed auction advert to sell your machine. If you are still with me let's see what  it can really show us.

Click on the operating system tab for detailed information about your operating system's build.

advanced system information too

CPU will show you detailed, advanced system information about your CPU as you can see below:

system information app windows

The RAM section is very handy for seeing how many memory slots your machine has and has available. You can see each slot and what is in it as you can see below. From this information I know that I have only two slots and they are both filled with 2GB, or 2048MB as it shows here, sticks in them.

advanced system information app

Next up is motherboard. This is a really easy to find out your motherboard's BIOS version among other information as you can see here:

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And if you ever need to know about your display driver or monitor driver you can click the display tab and see the following information:

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The hard drive tab will show you everything you will ever need to know about your hard drives including SMART information about them. That can show you a drive that is heading for the graveyard months before it actually happens in some cases! You will also see partition information, manufacturer, size and interface among many other fields.

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The optical drive tab shows you information about your CD and DVD drives:

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And the final tab is audio which shows all audio devices on your system

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This small portable application gathers all of this information into a single place and for me, who has to work on systems regularly, this is a huge help and plays a key role sometimes in diagnosing computer issues. It is part of my admin's toolkit. Do you have a favorite portable tool that does the same thing? We would love to hear about it in the comments!