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Tools for hardware diagnostics under Windows

Put Through Their Paces

Article from ADMIN 85/2025

By Thomas Bär , By Frank-Michael Schlede

We look at one Windows on-board tool, five free tools, and a commercial tool to discover hardware installed on a Windows computer and determine whether it is still working properly.

Anyone looking for software that can be used to explore and check the hardware of a Windows computer could initially be overwhelmed by the sheer number of tools available. In this article, we look at a number of useful tools for this task, but we cannot claim this list is exhaustive because of the sheer number of tools on the market. Instead, we decided to test on-board resources and tools from the Windows environment, the open source community, and commercial programs that provide useful and practical support for controlling and managing hardware under Windows.

Windows Offerings

Both the older Windows versions from NT 4.0 and the current versions come with the msinfo32 command-line program, which reports a first look of the machine hardware. The program offers a good overview of the available devices and hardware components and can be called up from the search box or directly at the command line. In the typical style of command-line programs, msinfo32 can be called up with various options. For example, you can query the data of another system in the network with the command:

msinfo32 "/computer <computer name>"

Hardware information includes details about the processor and motherboard and a couple of other things in the program's system overview, but msinfo32 delivers a mass of data related to software components, as well. The Hardware Resources entry in the sidebar of the System Information dialog contains detailed information on RAM and installed controllers. The Components category lists devices for CD, DVD, and hard drives. Whereas Drives means filesystems and their assignments, the Disks entry gives you information on the hard disks installed, such as their manufacturers and connections.

This information can also be found in the System section of the Windows

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