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##Belarc Advisor

Coming from the world of Mac troubleshooting we have been used to being able to quickly get a listing of hardware and software on a system simply by invoking [Apple System Profiler](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_System_Profiler). Microsoft does not provide a way to gather such detailed information with their built-in utilities. If you have ever had to figure out what model of video card or motherboard is in a PC, especially when the drivers aren’t installed yet, you know that you often have to resort to physically inspecting the hardware.

Belarc Advisor is a free (for personal use) utility that runs on Windows that generates a nicely formatted html report detailing the specific hardware and software present on that system. It is compatible with Windows versions from Windows 95 up to Vista. Creating inventories of Windows boxen is a hassle without it.

You can download it here: [http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html](http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html)

##SIW

[System Information for Windows (SIW)](http://www.gtopala.com/) is another good option for gathering system profile information. It doesn’t require the installation of any software which is nice if you are inventorying sytems that you don’t want to modify.