Raymond.CC Blog

I once worked in a college and there are hundreds of computers to maintain. One day my supervisor asked me to get ALL of the computer’s hardware information such as the CPU, motherboard, memory and hard disk size. We need to have an updated list of computer specifications in order to know which are outdated and which parts went missing.

I thought to myself, if I am going to boot up one by one to check the hardware information, it would take a very long time to complete. Moreover, it is tedious to do that alone. Searched around the internet and found a very useful program that performs computer configuration analysis and diagnostics. It gives detailed information about your computer hardware and devices operational modes, including undocumented information. A unique quick HDD Health Status checker is included. It provides information on CPU, motherboard, hard disks, S.M.A.R.T., CD/DVD devices, SCSI devices, memory modules, chipset, BIOS, PCI/AGP, ISA/PnP and PnP devices, monitor, video card, sound card, network card, printer, etc. This program also creates a report file in plain text, INI, HTML and XML format, and is able to run in batch mode.


ASTRA – Advanced Sysinfo Tool and Reporting Assistant is a shareware that is able to do this. There’s 2 versions of ASTRA. The one that you can run in DOS and Windows. The good thing about running in DOS is you don’t need an operating system to run ASTRA. There’s no need for installation as well. Just pop in the floppy disk and boot it to your floppy drive. It will automatically load ASTRA and in no time all your computer’s hardware information will be made available to you.

As for Windows version, it is called ASTRA32. Same function as ASTRA DOS but this must run on Windows. You’ll have a very nice and tidy graphical user interface with all your hardware informations.

Both versions of ASTRA is able to get the following hardware informations:

With the help of ASTRA, I was able to complete my job within 1 weeks time on a few hundred computers alone. Even my supervisor was impressed! Well, I was more impressed with the software functionality! Too bad this software is not FREE. Well, with the demo version, you’re still able to get basic hardware and software detection except you can’t create a file report and also can’t get serial number of the hardware. It depends on your needs and only cost $29.95 for Home license and $44.95 for Professional.

[ Download ASTRA for DOS | ASTRA32 for Windows ]