Description of Microsoft System Information (Msinfo32.exe) Tool

Summary

Windows includes a tool called Microsoft System Information (Msinfo32.exe). This tool gathers information about your computer and displays a comprehensive view of your hardware, system components, and software environment, which you can use to diagnose computer issues.

If you run MSINFO32 without Administrator privileges, it may show some drivers as stopped when they are not. This is because the cache for this information requires Administrator privileges to update. To avoid this issue, make sure to run MSINFO32 with Administrator privileges.

MSINFO32 is not able to provide hardware information when run in Safe Mode. While Microsoft System Information can be run in Safe Mode, it is limited to displaying information about system components and the software environment.

More Information

How to start MSINFO32

Expand your version of Windows below for instructions to run MSINFO32:

Type msinfo32 in the Search box.

Right-click System Information in the search results and select Run as administrator.

While on the Start screen, type msinfo32. (Alternatively, swipe in from the right edge of the screen and select Search. If you are using a mouse, point to the lower-right corner of the screen, and then select Search. Then type msinfo32 in the Search box.)

Right-click (or tap and hold) the search results and select Run as administrator.

Click Start. Type msinfo32 in the Search box.

Right-click msinfo32.exe in the search results, and then click Run as administrator.

How to run MSINFO32 using the Command Prompt

You can also run MSINFO32 from an elevated command prompt. To open the command prompt, type cmd in the Search box. Then right-click Command Prompt in the search results and select Run as administrator.

You can perform the following tasks using the MSINFO32 command-line tool switches:

Create .nfo or .txt files that contain your system information.

Start System Information connected to a remote computer.

Use the following syntax in the command prompt to run the MSINFO32 command on computers that are running Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10:

Msinfo32 [ /nfo Path] [ /report Path] [ /computer ComputerName]

Parameters Path
Specifies the file to be opened in the format C:\ folder1\ file1. xxx where C is the drive letter, folder1 is the folder, file1 is the file and xxx is the file name extension.

ComputerName
This can be a Universal Naming Convention name, an IP address, or a Fully Qualified Domain Name.

/nfo
Saves the exported file as an .nfo file. If the file name that is specified in Path does not end in .nfo, an .nfo file name extension will be appended to the file name.

/report
Saves the file that is specified in Path in the .txt format. The file name will be saved exactly as it appears in path. The .txt file name extension will not be appended to the file unless it is specified in Path.

/computer
Starts System Information for the specified remote computer.

Note: When you connect to a remote computer, you must have appropriate permissions to access WMI on the remote computer.

Examples To view your System Information, type:

How to view system information on Windows 7

If you’re about to install a new app, or you’re troubleshooting your device, there is not a better place to figure out basic questions about the operating system and hardware than using System from Control Panel. The quickest way to get to System is to right-click the Computer shortcut and selecting Properties, from the Start menu or from most places where you see the Computer shortcut.

System is organized in four different sections with useful information about your computer: Windows edition shows you which version of Windows you are currently running and Service Pack number; System displays your computer’s Windows Experience Index based score, basically this is a number that tells you the overall capability of your computer, and important hardware detail (CPU make and model, installed memory, and if you are using 32-bit or 64-bit version); Computer name, domain, and workgroup settings shows just that information and you can modify these settings by clicking the Change settings link, and Windows activation, this verifies that you are using a genuine copy of Windows.

Links on the left pane allow you to access other sections in Windows that can provide more information about your computer like the Device Manager, where you can obtain detailed information of all installed hardware and driver information as well — Device Manager can also be accessed by typing devmgmt.msc in Windows’ Command Prompt or in the Run Command –, from the left pane you can also access the Remote Settings, System Protection (System Restore), and more.

How to see Windows 7 system info

System is a great place to get basic answers about your computer, but for a more technical and detailed information about your system configuration, Microsoft Windows comes with 3 other utilities:

Systeminfo

Systeminfo or systeminfo.exe is a command-line utility that is capable of showing information about Windows version, CPU, BIOS, memory and network information, and many other useful items.

Exporting your system configuration from systeminfo —To use Systeminfo you’ll need to open the Command Prompt, type systeminfo, and press Enter. Then if you want to save the output information to import it into a database or to just have an inventory of the components in your system, you can do this in two different file formats: Table and CSV. To export your system information in one of these formats, you’ll have to append the /FO command switch with the file format and the destination path with the file name. For example:

systeminfo /fo csv > C:\WinInfo.csv

Also, you are not limited to gather system information from your local computer alone with systeminfo, you can also get system information from Windows’ computers that are in the network by appending the /S switch. But, if the other computer don’t have your same username and password, you’ll need to supply the /U and /P switches too. Use this command-line as reference:

systeminfo /s ComputerName /fo csv >> C:\WinInfo.csv

Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line utility

If you are looking to view a crazy amount of system information, look no further, the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line or WMIC is a utility in Windows that is able to provide an extensive amount of information about system configuration, installed hardware, and Windows accounts. Run this utility by typing in the Command Prompt wmic or by typing a full command to output desire information, like:

wmic partition list brief /format:htable > C:\partitions.html

In the above example, the command will generate a well formatted and easy to read HTML file with information about all the partitions on your system. To view all WMIC syntax, in the Command Prompt type the following and press Enter:

System Information

System Information another utility in Windows that most geeks like to dig in to get information about a particular system. You can access this utility by doing a search for System Information in the Start menu or by using Run command, entering msinfo32.exe and pressing Enter. This utility provides well detailed information about software and hardware on a system in an easy to use and friendly graphical user interface.

In this How-To Windows article I introduced you to 4 built-in Windows utilities in which you can obtain a lot of information about your system. For most users, just going to the System settings will be more than enough to answer basic questions about a particular system. The other remaining utilities are great for troubleshooting and just to get a deeper understanding of your overall system.

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Get pc (system) information on windows machine

Is there a way to get the following information by using c# script.

PC Name Service Tag CPU type CPU speed size of the c:\ drive, Installed RAM, OS name, OS Product Key, Office Version, and Office Product Key.

5 Answers 5

WMI is what you’re looking for.

Let me add the link to Part 3 too, which concentrates on hardware via WMI

MSDN is also a great resource for WMI scopes.

You have PC Name as a value you want, so you can get this from Environment.MachineName if you want the local computer, or you can do IPHostEntry hostEntry = Dns.GetHostEntry(ip); then string host = hostEntry.HostName; to use DNS to resolve a remote computer’s name if you only have its IP.

You can get certain information from the registry, after you check that Remote Registry is running, assuming you want a remote computer:

And you can start it if found stopped:

Add this using statement to the top of your page:

For the Computer name, you can go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ComputerName\ActiveComputerName:

For any local registry commands, just remove RegistryKey.OpenRemoteBaseKey( and , computer) — it becomes:

The RegistryView.Registry64 is usually not required (you can use RegistryView.Default instead), but can be necessary if building a 32-bit app that needs to reach into a registry on a 64-bit OS. Instead of all in one line, you could also do something like this, for example:

For the CPU name:

For the OS Name and key:

From Geeks With Blogs for getting product keys:

That gets the hard ones out of the way. Point is, the registry is your friend.

How to See System Information in Windows 10

It is always useful to find details about the hardware, system components, and installed software on your computer. In Windows 10, there are a number of built-in solutions which allow the user to see system information in a useful way.

Table of contents.

System Information (msinfo32)

To See System Information in Windows 10, you can start with the msinfo32.exe app, known as «System Information». It is a classic tool which is included since Windows 95. It shows a rich collection of various parameters of Windows 10.

To open the System Information app, press the Win + R shortcut keys to open the Run dialog.

In the Run box, type or copy-paste the following text:

Now hit the Enter key to open System Information.

The user interface of the app consists of two panels. The left panel is a navigation tree which allows you to browse various categories the information is arranged in. The main categories are as follows:

System Summary. Here you’ll find general information about your computer system. It includes the Windows version, its installation directory, the amount of RAM and the size of the swap file and many other interesting parameters.

Hardware Resources contains a number of technical details like interrupt requests (IRQs), input/output (I/O) addresses, and memory addresses.

Components shows details about the OS configuration and parameters related to peripheral devices, USB devices, and motherboard ports.

Software Environment displays information about drivers, running services, defined environment variables, and so on.

The systeminfo console app

Systeminfo is console app bundled with Windows 10. It can be a good alternative to msinfo32. It prints a lot of useful information at the command prompt including the computer’s name, the installed operating system details, CPU information, the operating system uptime, and so on. To launch it, open a new command prompt and type

The Settings app

You can also use Settings to retrieve some information about the operating system you are running. Settings is a new app in Windows 10 which was introduced in Windows 8 as a classic Control Panel alternative. Here is how.

Open Settings and Go to System — About. On that page, you’ll find information about the installed CPU, RAM, the operating system edition and bitness.

Classic Control Panel

One of the applets available in the classic Control Panel app can be used to see some details about the installed operating system. Open Control Panel and go to Control Panel\System and Security\System. Under System on the right, you’ll find mostly the same details that you see in Settings.

That’s it. Of course, third-party apps like AIDA64 can be far more useful than the built-in Windows tools. If you are familiar with WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and scripting, you could extract tons of information about your system. However, the built-in apps are good enough when you are not able to install any additional software but still need to inspect the configuration of a computer.

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About Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.