Hardware detection tool

Today, I wanted to know my graphics card dedicated memory. I looked around windows 7 but could not find it. In fact my graphics card control center (ATI catalyst control center) does not have this information. So I decided to google for a hardware detection tool and found HWInfo32. This is a must have for geeks who want to know about their system, its performance, cpu heat, and little bit benchmarking. I forgot to tell you that its freeware, so just go get it.

I ran the program and it failed as it required elevated rights. So I ran it again with administrator permission (right click -> Run as administrator). You will see a dialog window with most sought information there. In its main window there is summary tab which gives detail information about hardware components. The next tab lets you export your report to many different formats (xml, html, csv, etc). Then there is a nifty little benchmark and sensor monitor that can be quite handy.

Here is the feature list taken from its website:


Comprehensive hardware information
System health monitoring (Thermal, Voltage, Fan, Power)
Basic benchmarks
Text, CSV, XML, HTML, MHTML report formats
Periodical updates
OS: Windows 9x/2000/XP/Vista/Server 2003/2008/Windows 7
Platform: 32-bit (IA-32), 64-bit (x64, IA-64)