Just 2 days after I’ve introduced a software that I used to extract computer’s hardware information, Pete Hahn from Australia kindly emailed me to let me know that there’s another FREE tool that can do the same. Not only it can extract your hardware information, it can also get the list of software installed on your computer, hotfixes installed from Windows Update, what anti-virus software installed on your computer and etc.
The Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks, and displays the results in your default Web browser. All of your PC profile information is kept private on your PC and is not sent to any web server.
The file size to download Belarc Advisor is only 1MB. It runs on Windows 95/98/Me, NT 4, Windows 2000, XP and Windows Server 2003. As for Vista, I’m not so sure on that because it didn’t say anything on their website. Belarc Advisor requires browser such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, Maxthon and etc to display the results.
Once downloaded, just run advisor.exe to install. After installation, it will automatically run and you’ll see a dialog box similar to the image below. That is when the software is extracting your computer’s hardware and software information.
In just a few seconds later, your default browser will be ran and the results will be displayed.
A few important note:
1. The license associated with this product allows for free personal use only. Use on multiple PCs in a corporate, educational, military or government installation is prohibited.
2. The CIS (Center for Internet Security) has developed security benchmarks for Windows 2000, XP Professional and 2003 versions. There are no benchmarks for XP Home or 95/98 versions of Windows.
This tool is free and great but too bad it doesn’t have a DOS version where you don’t need to have operating system to extract the hardware inventory.
[ Download Belarc Advisor 7.2a – Free Personal PC Audit ]
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