I am often called upon to help someone fix a problem with his or her computer via telephone. Most times it is pretty easy but other times I need to know a lot of information about their computer and the software installed on it. This ends in an extensive question and answer session until I find what might be causing the problem. I found an excellent free solution in a program called Belarc Advisor. This program will audit your system and identify your hardware and software and creates an HTML file containing the information. The person with the ailing computer can send me that file and I can diagnose their problem much easily.
This report provides all kinds of great information like processor type and speed, BIOS versions, drive types and space, and even the network card MAC address. On the software side you get a list of all of the software installed on the system complete with version numbers. Each program listed also provides a link to the program's directory. I ran this program on all of my household systems for backup purposes.
Download this program from Belarc.
—
Ken Hopkins <ken@hopkinscomputing.com>
