Speccy Tells You What's Under the Hood of Your PC

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 08 Dec 2010

Expert users know their system’s specs like a fat kid knows where to find chocolate. Wake such a computer up in the middle of the night and he will recite his system’s specs without missing a beat. Regular, less computer savvy users on the other hand may not know what's hiding under their computer’s hood, so to speak.

What can they do to find out? They could right click My Computer (Windows XP) or Computer (Windows 7), select Properties, then take a look at the information the Microsoft-developed operating system shows them. The problem with this approach is that you don’t get access to very much information.

To get access to a lot of information, they would have to turn to a 3rd party application for help, an application like the Piriform-developed Speccy. Offered free of charge for personal use, this system information tool for Windows provides users with detailed information about what’s under their PC’s hood. Novice users will like that Speccy is quite easy to use while expert users will like that Speccy offers a wealth of information about their system.

“Speccy will give you detailed statistics on every piece of hardware in your computer,” explains UK-based software developer Piriform. “Including CPU, Motherboard, RAM, Graphics Cards, Hard Disks, Optical Drives, Audio support. Additionally Speccy adds the temperatures of your different components, so you can easily see if there's a problem!”

Here’s a real-life example that proves Speccy’s usefulness. You finally realize that 1GB of RAM is not enough and decide to go get some more RAM. The problem is that you don’t know what type of RAM memory you have, nor do you know if you have any free slots to put the new RAM into. By using Speccy you can easily find out what RAM you have and how many slots you have available.

If you would like to get Speccy, you can download it straight from Piriform here.

Top Tip: you may want to check out CCleaner, Recuva and Defraggler, three other freeware applications offered by Piriform.


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