System information

While Windows XP's System Information will tell you vital details about your system, there is a great deal it doesn't tell you. You can ferret out far more information using Aida32 (from http://www.aida32.hu) or Belarc Advisor (from http://www.belarc.com). .

With the aid of such programs you can find out most of the information you need when deciding whether to upgrade or replace. After you have deduced as much as you can, carefully open the case and inspect the inside. Don't poke about unnecessarily and earth yourself before you touch anything. Is there room for that extra drive? Are there free memory slots and free PCI slots? What rating does the power supply have? If the case is an ATX design, does the power supply connect in one or two places to the motherboard. Modern motherboards for Pentium 4 and Athlon CPUs need two connections.

If you don't understand the previous paragraph, you may need some help in assessing the suitability of your computer for upgrading. Consult one of the more experienced members of the Group or our technical advisor. Don't go near a computer shop until you have armed yourself with as much knowledge of your computer's specifications as possible.

Note: AIDA32 is a professional system information, diagnostics and benchmarking program running on Win32 platforms. It extracts details of all components of the PC. It can display information on the screen, print it, or save it to file in various formats like HTML, CSV or XML. For corporate users, AIDA32 offers command-line switches, network audit and audit statistics, remote system information and network management. It does not need to be installed and can be run from a CD by simply copying to the CD all the files that are unpacked from the distribution Zip file.

Unfortunately development has now stopped and the database of hardware information will not continue to be updated. While still extremely useful, Aida32 will gradually become obsolete, unless someone else takes over updating it.

Features:

• full hardware & software information on 85 pages
• built-in hardware database: detailed information about 28000 components
• physical information for CPU, motherboard, hard disk, optical drive
• motherboard chipset, buses, sensor information
• installed programs, event logs list
• diagnostics module to reveal possible problems
• memory benchmark
• automatic audit via command-line switches
• SQL database support (ADO/ODBC)
• remote control through TCP/IP network
• 32-bit low-level hardware detection
• multi-threaded program model
• full Windows XP compatibility
• full Windows Server 2003 compatibility
• Iomega Active Disk support

As a substitute, I suggest Belarc Advisor, which is free for personal use only. If you can suggest another replacement, please email the Webmaster at the address below.