System Information Retriever

System Information Retriever is a lightweight and portable piece of kit that does exactly what it says: it fetches information on the computer that is related to hardware and software. It does not come packed with complex options or configuration parameters, so it can be handled by anyone, even users with little or no experience in such apps.

Portability advantages

Since there is no installation involved, you can drop the executable file in any part of the hard disk and just click it to run.
Another possibility is to save System Information Retriever to a USB flash disk or similar storage unit, in order to run it on any computer with minimum effort and no other installers,
An important aspect worth taking into account is that the Windows registry and Start menu do no get updated with new entries, and no extra files are created on the disk, leaving it clean after removal.

Clear-cut interface and options

The tool may take a while to load all data at startup. They focus on the computer name, memory, domain, type, available memory and MAC address, BIOS (manufacturer, version, description, release date), operating system (name, version, product ID, last boot time) and CPU (processor, clock, manufacturer, specs, family, unique ID).
In addition, you can find out data about the motherboard (manufacturer, bus type, unique serial number, model), VGA (name, video mode, driver version, chip type, memory, DAC type), drives (HDD name, size and serial number, USB drive) and others (CD-ROM, network, sound, printer).
Information can be printed. Although System Information Retriever does not integrate options for exporting data to file or copying it to the Clipboard, the latter option is possible by triggering the global hotkey for Copy.

Evaluation and conclusion

We haven't come across any issues throughout our evaluation, since the app did not hang, crash or pop up error messages. It displays accurate information and runs on low CPU and RAM, so it does not affect the PC's overall performance. It may not be as resourceful as other similar apps (like Speccy), but System Information Retriever shows some important details about the computer's configuration.