How to Quickly Gather Your System Information with Speccy

When you computer messes up and you call the tech support guy, what happens? You are completely stumped when he/she asks you about your RAM’s bus speed or your video card’s model number. Right-clicking “My Computer” and accessing its properties only shows you the most basic system information. What if you are checking a system up for sale and you need to know whether it has all the hardware (and the type of hardware) which is advertised? You can’t start taking apart its casing and see what’s under the hood; that would be simply consume too much time.

In all such situations, when you need to know your system specifications fast, Speccy comes in handy greatly.  Speccy is the creation of Piriform, the developers behind the very popular products CCleaner, Defraggler, and Recuva.  Speccy, like Piriform’s other great ventures, is a great system utility that presents you with a comprehensive knowledge of your system specifics. With a size of only 1.2MB, this freeware can be quickly installed.

When you run the program, it quickly gathers your system’s information and spends not more than 5 seconds doing it. You are presented with a window summarizing all specifications:

To access detailed information about specific components, simply choose the component from the left panel. Say you choose RAM, a screen similar to this appears:

All sorts of information is presented, including whether or not your RAM is running on Dual Channel and what are their individual and combined bus speeds.

You can even see the current temperatures of various PC components and see if your casing has proper air ventilation. For processors with multiple cores, you can see the temperature of each core! Just click on the CPU link in the left panel:

If your hard drive supports SMART features, you can even check their temperature and see if they are within the ‘OK’ temperature range:

Throughout these tables, the values accompanied with green bars (such as temperatures and bus speeds) can be clicked to show a value-time graph; you will then be able to notice the changes with time:

Equipped with Speccy, you can easily find out what a computer contains. In certain situations, this little program can prove to be mighty useful, saving your time as well as your money.