Belarc Advisor for PC Audit

Don’t know what exact peripheral make and model you have on board your PC?

Check out Belarc Advisor (free to download). What it actually does is it build a profile of your installed software and hardware, including Microsoft Hotfixes, and displays the results in your browser.

It basically audits your entire PC and show you what you got inside and what has been installed. Very helpful if you don’t know what’s the make/model of that soundcard or internal modem that doesn’t seem to work. Been using this on dozens and dozens of PC before and it’s pretty comprehensive I only know of a couple instances that it can’t identify a hardware.

I got first hold of this back when I was still in HeadStrong and we were asked to run a PC Audit on our workstations in order to identify softwares/games which aren’t supposed to be installed (read: WarCraft). It appears to read the registry for the details. What we did before was make a copy of WC3 on another folder, uninstalled it from the Control Panel then move the copy back to its original path. We could still play WC3 without it being detected in the audit process.