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Comment by pomian | Hacker News Reader

And yet, CPU-Z, is still a fantastic tool to see what ram your system has, what motherboard, what processor, especially in am old system you may want to upgrade. Just to know what family of processor you have, is extremely useful. It's a great tool at what it does well.

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I would take whatever information they show with a grain of salt as it seems to simply relay superficial information the system BIOS/UEFI reports without verification.

For example, a stick or channel of system RAM may fail training at boot and end up being silently disabled. CPU-Z would blindly report all memory channels being present despite Windows task manager showing correctly that some of the memory are unavailable.

I love that it's a small portable exe. I don't want to install some app to view some info one time.

Every time I use it I am irritated that it won't let me copy the name of my graphics card or other components and I have to retype them manually.

Alternatively there is HWinFO (which also has a portable version).

https://www.hwinfo.com

> Just to know what family of processor you have, is extremely useful.

Just start task manager, ctrl+shift+esc...

(BTW to me owning a computer and not knowing what's inside is like not knowing what brand of car you own [never owned a car personally but I imagine this analogy works for most].)

After owning computers for 40 years and helping friends and family with computers just as long, this gets harder and harder to keep track of. Especially now when there is no real need for a new computer unless something breaks. Then I need to know what I have and what I can replace it with.

So now I run the tools and save the info on my harddrive to be able to look up before I go home to someone to fix a computer.

> owning a computer and not knowing what's inside is like not knowing what brand of car you own

It's more like not knowing what type of engine your car has.

Most people don't know or care what type of engine/cpu they have, they just know the brand (and maybe model) of the entire machine.

I'm a tech person and I don't even know what CPU is in my computer right now. I know I have a thinkpad x1. I know I paid for the i7 upgrade. I know where to find the CPU model if needed. But day-to-day I just don't care.

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