Lately figuring out what kind of peripherals are installed on a computer is driving me up the wall. For example, I know there are ways of finding out what kind of motherboard is installed on a computer; reboot and pause the bootup sequence, and you see what motherboard is installed. What I want, however, is a program that can be run from a memory stick, which will detect what kind of equipment is being used, and save that to a text file on the memory stick, so I can view it easily, and then go get the drivers (or whatever) I need to fix whatever problem I am trying to deal with at the moment.
Are there any diagnostic/utility programs out there that will do this?
The hardest part of what you are looking for is booting from a memory stick. I think most utilities you are going to find that will profile your system are going to be Windows based, though there’s probably some Linux alternatives out there. Both are going to assume they are running in an OS, though, so you’re going to need to boot into either Windows or Linux first.
I haven’t tried either from a memory stick, but have used BartPE quite a bit to boot into a Windows environment from CD. It does have memory stick support, so you could boot to a BartPE Windows, run your favorite profile utility, and save the output to your memory stick.
In the past I’ve used Knoppix for a bootable Linux OS CD if you find a profiling utility that runs under Linux.
Edit: After posting I see that maybe you didn’t want to boot to a memory stick, but just to run the profiling software from the memory stick. If that’s the case then you can probably ignore BartPE and Knoppix. If you’re already booted into Windows XP and want to do a quick profile of your system you can always go Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | System Information. That might give you the information you need.
So, things have calmed down here, and I have a minute of time to follow up on this thread. Belarc.com’s utility got me through the crisis I was having. Now, I am going to look at the others.