HWiNFO32 3.30

This foreground window presents an overview of your system at a first glance it seems very busy, and it is! If you're someone who doesn't follow the latest CPU advances, or know every proprietary technology Intel has put into their chips since their establishment it all seems rather daunting. What is great about HWinFO32™ is it doesn't make you go and trawl through endless documentation online. When you hover over each acronym it will spell out what it stands for – great for if you want to Google it and find out more information, or you're just curious. This screen covers most of the core system components giving a clear picture of your system.

After you have had enough of watching your CPU activity change as you do different tasks it is time to enter the main application! To do this you have to click the somewhat confusingly named “Close” button.

Once you are inside the main application the full window is in view. This will tell you a whole wealth of information, from the basics of your processor speed through to the obscure stuff such as the date your RAM was manufactured and everything in-between.

With all this information at your fingertips you start to wonder what use it all is; while you could copy and paste it on a PC forum a better idea is to push the benchmark button. After pushing it, it will then test your system and show you the results for core components (Processor, HDD and RAM).
While this is very useful it gets even better; while on the results page if you click “compare” it will plot your score against other components on the market.

What is also nice is you can export all of this information in a report, in a range of formats and you can pick and choose exactly what details you put on the report. Great if you are trying to show off your new PC but don't want to let slip that it has onboard graphics as you spent it all on RAM! There is also a handy “sensors” function which will retrieve all your system temperatures; especially good if you are looking at getting some type of cooling system or perhaps debating over clocking your system. Be warned though, running this will cause your PC to lock up for a moment while it grabs all the data.

So to summarise; it provides a nice, clean interface which manages to display a lot of information very clearly, resulting in a good user experience. With the ability to customise its reports and the straightforward visual comparisons to other hardware it is a nice little application to have on your system. Even if you only use it when you're trying to justify that new upgrade to yourself!

Download HWiNFO32!

Matt S-H – December 3, 2009