Belarc Advisor - Detailed information about your computer's hardware and software

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Summary: It's often desirable to have a comprehensive list of all the hardware and software installed on your machine. Belarc Advisor is the way to get it.

Indeed there is.

There are various tools, including Windows itself, that will report on various aspects of your computers configuration. Most focus on one or two specific aspects, though, and make it difficult to form a picture of your computer as a whole.

Belarc Advisor is a PC auditing program that examines your computer and produces a one-page report of all the hardware and software installed on it.

A very comprehensive report.

Here's an image of just a portion of the report on my desktop machine:

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The report goes on to include all Users, Printers, Displays, Network adapters and other hardware, as well as listing all installed software, licenses (including product keys) and hotfixes.

It's an impressive list.

Belarc Advisor also provides a level of evaluation, letting you know whether or not you are up to date on security fixes and the state of your virus protection. There's also an exhaustive benchmark of your overall security status. (Quite frankly this last is overkill for the average user, but highlights many additional things that can be done to "lock down" a system to be used in a security conscious environment. Here at home, I failed this benchmark. )

Belarc Advisor is free for personal use, and a great utility for auditing and recording your comprehensive system state.

I recommend it.

Related:

• How do I find out what's installed on my machine? Programs can be installed in many ways and many places. There's no single authoritative list of what's installed, but we can get close.

• Shovelware: What do I do with all this extra software on my new machine? Shovelware - lots of extra software you didn't ask for - appears on almost every new machine these days. I look at why shovelware exists, and what you might want to do about it.

Article 12735 | Posted October 10, 2008