Get a Windows system report with MSInfo 32.
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom.
Here for askleo.com
Have you ever needed to describe some of the hardware or software specifics
of your machine to somebody else, not really knowing what it is they're
looking for or understood the terminology that they've used?
Well, there are a number of tools out there that will basically generate a very
nice report of exactly what your system is made of.
One of them is built into Windows itself.
Let me show you MSINFO32.
So there are a couple of different ways to run this.
The way that probably is the most common will be to hit the Windows key and the R
key together and then, well, you can see I've already typed it in here before
MSINFO32 and just hit OK.
Now I'm not going to do that because I want to do it a slightly different way.
What I'm going to suggest you do instead is right click on the Start button,
run either Windows Terminal PowerShell or Command prompt.
Doesn't matter which one is here.
As admin, I believe you'll have access
to a few additional things that may not necessarily show up in the default report.
So this time I'm just going to type in MSINFO32 and hit Enter.
And there it is.
We've got a nice summary right now of what we're looking at in our machine.
I'm going to move this boundary over
a little bit so that we can see some of the longer text and make this a little
bit bigger since some of the text will be a little bit longer.
You can see that down below.
But very quickly you can see that this
machine is running this version of Windows.
This build the system name that I happen to have
for this one, a number of other very interesting and sometimes completely
useless pieces of information about your system.
You can see I've got 4GB of Ram, 1.6gb is available, et cetera.
I mean there's a lot of information here
and in fact this one I think is almost completely here.
But we can now go and look at some
of these other branches of information that are available.
Hardware resources.
This usually isn't all that useful.
Conflicts there aren't any DMA not being shown IO.
None of this kind of stuff is terribly interesting.
We can go through all of the interrupt requests.
There's a bunch and they are potentially not being used right now.
You can see that a couple of them are memory.
This has more to do with system
allocations of memory rather than memory being used.
Components I don't have a CD Rom, so there won't be one.
Listen, I don't have a sound device on this machine, but there's a display
with information about the display and the driver and what the hardware looks like.
I don't have a modem.
I do have a network here's.
Information about the adapter and so on.
Ports, storage.
Here's all the disks that are associated
with this machine, which is exactly one disk drives, I believe,
are the logical drive that you see, like in this case, C disks,
on the other hand, would be the hardware underlying those drives.
In this case, we have exactly one drive and it's on exactly one disk.
So they'd be the same. But if you have multiple partitions
with different letters, they might show up here separately under
drives, and yet you might still have only one disk.
USB. I don't have anything on here.
Software environment then also gets interesting because here are system
drivers that are associated with this machine.
And you can see that there are many.
Here are environment variables.
There are no print jobs currently.
There is apparently no network connection
currently active on this machine running tasks.
This is essentially the same information
that you would get out of Process Explorer or the Task Manager more detailed list,
but you can see it's listing everything that's currently running.
Loaded modules is a different approach
to what's actually loaded into memory while the system is running.
As you can see, it's taking a little while
to gather this information because, well, it's Windows, there's a lot.
But you can see now all of the different
programs, the DLLs and so forth, that are currently being used.
You can see I can make this path a little
bit longer, and you can see all of the different
things that are currently loaded or being used by running software.
The services that are running.
You could also get this with the Service Manager, program groups,
the Start menu, startup programs, a few other things.
Windows Error Reporting is basically another look at the event viewer
information, which, as we have discussed before, is often a complete mess.
However, with so much of this information,
some of it's interesting and actually, honestly, I encourage you to poke around
in here and kind of look at what you find on your system.
I will tell you that there will be lots
of it that you don't understand that will make no sense, and that's okay.
Same thing with like here, we're looking at Windows Error Reporting.
Yes, there's Windows Error Reporting,
there's a fault bucket, there's all sorts of details here.
I have no idea what this means and it honestly doesn't matter.
What's interesting about this tool not necessarily poking around,
what's interesting to me is this ability to export.
I'm going to export this information, all of it.
You can see I'm going to have a new report here, since I already have one.
When I export, it's going to create a text file.
That text file will have all of the information that we've been looking
at in a format that is readable by anybody.
And since it's in a file,
you can now attach that to a piece of email or transfer it to somebody else
who's trying to help you with a problem on your machine.
It has tons of information in there.
That's fine.
Better too much than too little.
Now you can see it's taken a few seconds to generate this report because honestly,
there's a lot of information that goes into it.
But where is it?
Well, I'm going to go ahead and close MSINFO32.
Fire and close my PowerShell here and run Windows File Explorer because
there in documents we will find my new report.
It's a text document.
So if I just double click on it, it'll open up a notepad.
I'm going to go ahead and resize notepad here to be a little bit bigger,
make this a little bit more readable to the extent that it can be.
It's a text file.
So there's no fancy formatting, no columns, none of that kind of stuff.
But you can see now that everything that was displayed in the MSINFO32 has
been dumped to this text file, including all of the programs that are
running, all of the things that are loaded.
And in fact,
the piece that took the longest amount of time to generate was in fact all
the way down here at the bottom, the Windows Error Reporting.
Basically the stuff that you're used to seeing in the Event Viewer.
That's fine.
Here's a bunch of information.
Now if we take a look,
we can see that this file is gosh, it's a megabyte in size 1.2 megabytes.
But the good news here is that all the information is in this file.
This is a file now that you can present or give to somebody who's trying to help you
with your machine and give them all of the information that they could
possibly want aside from the steps you've taken to do whatever problem or cause or
replicate the problem that you seem to be having.
But the point is that this will give them all of the information that they might
need to use about understanding just what is your system all about.
Like I said, there are other tools that will do this.
Some of them will do them in prettier,
some of them will do it in different formats.
But the bottom line here is that you don't necessarily need them.
MSINFO32 will give you a ton
of information right there built in with Windows.
Now I do want to,
as you're browsing the information, give you a couple of caveats.
The biggest caveat is simply this don't panic over what you see.
As we've already learned
with Windows Event Viewer, it is extremely common for the word error
to show up often on a system that's running perfectly well or failed.
Failed is another term you'll see a lot.
Very often the term failed is used not because something has broken or something
isn't working as it should, but because maybe something isn't present.
The system goes out and checks for the presence of a piece of hardware.
It's not there.
So technically that check failed.
It's not a problem, it's a working system.
That isn't to say that there aren't
failures that actually show up as failed, but what I don't want you to do is panic
because you see a lot of failed or errors in the information here.
Similarly, empty items are also not uncommon.
We discovered a few of those as we were
browsing through the hardware section in the MSINFO32 view of things.
This is also common.
All of the information here really depends tremendously on the specific configuration
of your machine and what it's doing at the time.
But that's kind of its point.
Its intent is to present and allow you
to save a snapshot of what your machine looks like at a specific point in time.
I hope you find the tool useful know I do.
For updates, for comments,
for related links and more, visit askleo.com/147292.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.