With more than a dozen competing tools available for examining the innards of your machine, coming up with the “best” revolves around what you need and what you expect. I’ve long recommended HWiNFO and Belarc Advisor, but of late I’ve settled on Speccy (free for everybody).

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Like other hardware/software scanners, Speccy ferrets out all sorts of information, including real-time monitoring of internal temperatures, and a full SMART status report for each drive. The operating system report for Win10 includes details such as your Windows Update status, antivirus in use, scheduled tasks, .Net Framework versions installed, and much more.

Unlike other examining programs, Speccy makes it easy to output reports, including free website posting. Speccy can be installed, or it can be run “portable” with no installation required.

Both Speccy and Recuva (preceding slide) are made by Piriform, which also CCleaner. I don’t recommend CCleaner because many people use it to clean their registries -- and some rue the day they did. I realize that’s a religious statement open to debate, but I firmly believe the potential downside to using a registry cleaner far exceed the potential upside of cleaning out a few KB of aberrant entries here and there. If you use CCleaner for one of its many other features and studiously avoid registry cleaning, it’s a good one to add to your arsenal.