Everest Home Edition, System Information Software

This fascinating freeware is a system information and diagnostic application that gives you an interface that the Windows Control Panel just can’t offer. All of the information Everest provides is something you could find on your own, it would just take much longer. Even low-level hardware information is displayed in detail. The interface is friendly and almost fun, if you consider system diagnostics fun.

Download Everest Home Edition and give it a try. The features are thorough and best described by the creators themselves:

• Advanced hardware monitor with OSD panel and cooling fans monitoring
• Real-time alternating for hot-plug devices
• Portable Computer page to display mobile PC related information
• Bluetooth PAN support
• File Scanner filtering
• User benchmark results manager
• Monitor Diagnostics

You should probably download it soon, because it is no longer available in a free edition, except from the link provided.

The product line was discontinued one year ago and this is a pity because it has all the bells and whistles you could want from a good system diagnostics application. It is designed for both 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems. It uses very little system resources: minimum 486 processor with 32 MB RAM. Some dinosaur PCs could handle that.

From the interface, you can get specifics on all hardware components and full reports with formatting options. You can open up an HTML report on any component and see exactly what is going on.

This comes from Everest’s Report Wizard and all offsets are displayed as well. This is a panorama from which you can find any issues with PC hardware with ease. If you are already familiar with hardware diagnosis, this will be quite a treat. The Report wizard is a standard Windows layout. You get complete reports and you can export them to a file for comparative analysis.

For customization purposes, you can tweak to your heart’s content, but be careful not to blow the whole game. As always, backup and create a restore point if you are going to go messing around with settings.

Select any component from the menu and click the Report tab then choose a report in Plain Text, HTML or MHTML. Every detail is there before your eyes.

The first page of the Preferences module has a list of all user interface languages and it is as easy as selecting Preferences and then selecting a language to change the interface. Restart and the language is reset.

Open the system devices panel and everything is listed perfectly. Just scroll through specified devices and properties and get complete diagnostic reports. Everest Home Edition doesn’t miss anything. It is unfortunate that the program will have no further updates. It will soon be outgrown, but for now, this is a piece of software worth taking for a test drive. That is about what it takes to learn how to use it. Explore the options and get what is perhaps one of the clearest hardware diagnostic tools available for free, at least for now.

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© Melanie Gross for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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InfoTool, One Page Full Of Computer Hardware Information

Windows users have many programs at their disposal that display hardware related information. Heck, even the Windows Control Panel offers applets that display some information about the built-in hardware. Knowing your computer’s hardware can come in handy in a multitude of situations. This includes situations where you need to know if your computer supports a specific connection method (USB3 for instance) or if the computer meets the system requirements of a game or application.

The free software InfoTool is a portable application for the Windows operating system. It displays all hardware relevant information on one page in the interface.

Non-Dutch speaking users need to change the language of the application under Instellingen > Taal from Netherlands to English, Espanol or another supported language first.

Once done they get a detailed listing of the computer hardware. This includes information about the computer’s motherboard, process, memory, hard disks, sound cards, graphics cards, display and even the network card among other information.

The information presented on the screen should be enough to answer most hardware related compatibility questions. Some information on the other hand ware not as detailed as they could be. You do not get a listing of all computer ports for instance, and it takes a little bit of digging to sort out the number of memory modules installed on the system.

Some elements have not been translated into English, you will encounter the odd Dutch word even if you have selected English as the interface language. It is distracting but not to hard to figure out.

The program ships with an adviser module that can be used to find out if your computer supports a specific PC game. The information presented there are mostly in Dutch. It is still possible to understand if your computer meets the selected game’s requirements though. The software ships with hundreds of games listed including Assassin’s Creed 2, Batman Arkham Asylum, Modern Warfare 2 or the latest The Sims game.

It lacks information about some of the newer games that have been released recently or are about to be released. Another issue here is that the game information may not include Windows 7 in which case the program will report a compatibility error when in fact there is none.

Windows users can download InfoTool from the developer website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. (via)

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: Hardware, portable software, system information, windows software