Windows Tip Sheet
Get The 411 on Your System
Want your OS config information quickly? If you're running Vista, just use SystemInfo.
- By Jeffery Hicks
- 09/26/2007
Windows Vista includes a new command-line tool called SystemInfo. This
utility displays information about the operating system configuration
including service pack, page file, processor, memory, boot devices, network
cards and hotfixes. To run, simply type
Systeminfo at
a C:\ prompt.
By default the information displays as a list, but you can have it formatted
to comma separated values. You’ll only want to do this if you are
saving the results to a text file, like this:
C:\ systeminfo /fo CSV > mysystem.csv
SystemInfo is a pretty good utility, but it gets better. You can also
specify a remote server or desktop to query. You can even specify alternate
credentials:
C:\ systeminfo /s File09 /u mydomain\admin /p Passw0rd
You don’t have to specify a password. If you specify /p, you will
be prompted for the password, which won’t display on your screen.
You can probably see where I’m going with this if you've been reading
my columns for a while. Take a list of computers and get system information
saved to a single .CSV file. To get a clean file, this will take two steps:
C:\ systeminfo /fo csv > systeminformation.csv
C:\ for /f %m in (computers.txt) do @systeminfo /s %m /fo csv /nh >>systeminformation.csv
The first command runs against the local system and includes the header.
The second line processes the list of computer names, passing each name
to systeminfo. The information is formatted as CSV and no header is included.
Information from each computer is appended to the .CSV file.
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SystemInfo offers a pretty quick way to get lots of system information
that you normally need to query with WMI scripts or WMIC.
About the Author
Jeffery Hicks is an IT veteran with over 25 years of experience, much of it spent as an IT infrastructure consultant specializing in Microsoft server technologies with an emphasis in automation and efficiency. He is a multi-year recipient of the Microsoft MVP Award in Windows PowerShell. He works today as an independent author, trainer and consultant. Jeff has written for numerous online sites and print publications, is a contributing editor at Petri.com, and a frequent speaker at technology conferences and user groups.