If you want to get some information about what’s going on inside your PC, there are a lot of tools available to do it for you. Anything from monitoring your temperatures to checking which version of a particular piece of software of driver you have installed, there’s an information tool around to do it. Some of the more popular tools around you will probably know of, such as Speccy from the makers of CCleaner, PCWizard from the people that bring you CPU-Z and others like HWInfo32. One of the most well known is Aida64 (formally Everest) but that obviously isn’t free.
Kiwi System Info is another system information tool, but this one is pretty new and has not been around for many weeks. It’s is a little bit different in it’s approach though, as it doesn’t concentrate on things like temperatures, fan speeds and your hardware information all nicely laid out in an easy to read format. Kiwi pulls information directly from the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) component found inside Windows that can grab data from just about any part of your system.
There is a downside to this though, and that is the sheer amount of information given out can be quite overwhelming and a lot of the data is just numbers, so a bit of an experienced eye is required to interpret what you see.
Kiwi System Info is a very small download (170KB) and because it’s portable, the zip unpacks to only 360KB.
The interface is pretty simple and easy to use with the information split into icons:
Hardware Info: For just about every piece of hardware in your PC.
Data Storage: Information about hard drives , ROM drives and partitions.
Memory: Detailed analysis of memory components.
System Info: Info about drivers, services etc.
Network: Info about network adapters and network data.
User & Security: Info about accounts and logs.
Developer: Detailed info about performance counters / COM objects etc.
Using the software is pretty simple; select an icon across the top for the area to get the information from, and then select the individual category from the drop down to study the components values:
The main Window will give you the information gathered from the WMI. You might get the odd blank window or error; this just means Kiwi can’t read the WMI information usually because there might be nothing to read from the relevant values.
Kiwi System Info might not be to everyone’s taste because the data is not that easy to interpret in places, and there’s a lot of it, but if you want more numbers than the average system information tool might be able to give you, this is useful to have around.
Kiwi System Info is compatible with XP, Vista and Win 7 32 and 64 bit.