Take advantage of Systeminfo shortcuts

By Ed Bott

The venerable Systeminfo command has been a part of Windows since its earliest days and should be a part of every power user's toolkit.

Open a Command Prompt or PowerShell window, type systeminfo, and then press Enter. You'll be rewarded with a lengthy display of details about the current system configuration. (You can use the /s switch to gather this information from a remote machine, if you have administrative privileges on it.)

The raw Systeminfo output shows the current Windows edition and build number as well as information about the hardware, such as the system manufacturer and model name, BIOS version, and amount of memory installed.

Combine this command with the pipe character and the Find command to reduce that verbose output to the exact detail you're looking for. (You must do this from a Command Prompt window, not PowerShell.) Here are two examples:

systeminfo | find "Original Install Date" Returns the date and time when the current Windows version was installed

systeminfo | find "OS Version" Returns the build number of the current Windows version

For the full syntax, use the /? switch.

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