Ever wanted to check the temperature of your CPU? Ever wanted a software that could show you your hidden passwords, should you ever forget them? Here is a tool I found that is great for checking your system info at a glance! It’s simply called SIW (System Information for Windows) and is the most comprehensive system info tool I have yet seen.
SIW by Gabriel Topala, is just astounding in its features. You can view A LOT of your PC’s system info from its comprehensive dashboard which displays your system info in a hierarchal tree format. Practically all your system info is gathered and displayed in milliseconds, just by clicking on the icons in the sidebar.
-Why do I think it’s cool?
- Does NOT install itself on your Windows system. A standalone software.
- Which is why you can run it on your USB pen drive (or any external drive).
- Very useful for technicians to get a quick look on hardware specs and drivers, useful for almost all system diagnostics.
- Very light on resource usage and leaves only a small footprint on your system.
- Able to retrieve the passwords for the current logged-on user of a PC with the Secrets feature. Note: This feature could be abused – see below. Use it for your own password retrieval purposes.
- Certified as having no spyware or virus of any kind by all the major antivirus programs. I was skeptical at first, but… it’s true none of the AVs flag it.
- Able to export the info retrieved to HTML format.
- Has a MAC address changer (use with caution)
- Able to ping and trace routes
- Able to display the CPU temperature
- And a whole lot more stuff that you can view with this little tool….
Note on data security
For best data security practice, NEVER choose to remember your passwords in Firefox or Internet Explorer because both Firefox and IE do not encrypt your passwords, ever. I’ve never ever chosen the Remember Password option and I highly suggest to anyone not to. Always use a hard copy to write down all your passwords, and if you must, store them in an Excel spreadsheet and burn it on a CD and store it in a safe deposit box (just kidding about the safe deposit box).
But never store your passwords in Firefox or IE because of the lack of encryption. And by all means, get Windows XP, as thanks to this tool, it has showed me just how insecure Win98 really is. 😉
Aside from the questions raised about SIW’s password retrieval capabilities, this is a REALLY useful tool that is highly beneficial to just about any PC user to check on their system info at anytime.
At any rate, other system info tools also do the same, since they all are able to retrieve passwords from Firefox or IE; however SIW goes beyond the usual stuff to deliver almost complete information about your system info than most other comparable software.
And the cost is……FREE! Yeah, you got that right. Sometimes, the best stuff out there, are really free.
You can get SIW from here.