This little utility can be used to display whole bunch of information about your hard/cd/dvd/usb drives. Here are the main features at a glance:
- Display a list of all partitions and drives;
- Mapped drive letters;
- CD-ROM/DVD Drive info and capabilities;
- CD/DVD Media info;
- “Subst” i.e. assign a drive letter to a folder;
- Drive details like Vendor, Serial Number, etc.
- Portable – just one executable;
- Benchmarks;
Version Reviewed: 4.10
Home Page: Drive Manager
Following an earlier post about SIW for a software to use as a hardware detection here is a great portable alternative. HWiNFO32 Features very comprehensive hardware detection set. It can also monitor various sensors on your computer (like temperatures, voltages, etc.). Contains some basic benchmarking, which can be useful.
Overall a very useful program to have on your USB Drive.
SpeedFan is a fast and small program for showing and monitoring various temperature sensors on your computer as well as reading S.M.A.R.T. values from your hard drive. It can also read and monitor voltages from most computers. I use it mostly to look at temperatures for my hard drive, for which I sometimes wonder if it overheats. Very valuable to read the S.M.A.R.T. values to see if there are any cluster reallocation, etc. The tool is a must have.
SIW is a system information utility that can help you find out all your system components and information about them. It can detect myriad of software and hardware properties and information about motherboard, chipset, sensors, BIOS, CPU, PCI/AGP, Video Cards, etc. On the software side it can help you determine software license keys, recover passwords, audit installed applications and windows components, reveal passwords behind asterisks, and many others.
SIW is a portable application, so it is suitable to add to and run from your USB memory stick to have it handy anywhere you go.
CPU-Z is a small utility that detects and reports information about your computer’s CPU, Memory and Mainboard. Since it is portable and does not write any information on your computer it makes it a good candidate to include in your USB drive tools collection.
CPU-Z reports CPU make/model/voltage/speed/socket/etc., Chipset and BIOS information, Memory size/speed/latency. It supports a wide variety of chipsets and CPUs, from very old to very new since it is frequently updated.
