Get detailed information about your PC and run benchmarks with PC Wizard

Overview:

PC WIZARD 2008 is also an utility designed to analyze and benchmark your computer system. It can analyze and benchmark many kinds of hardware, such as CPU performance, Cache performance, RAM performance, Hard Disk performance, CD/DVD-ROM performance, Removable/FLASH Media performance, Video performance, MP3 compression performance.

Features:

• Can save, print, e-mail a report
• Can save a TXT, RTF, HTML, PDF or CSV report
• Can export any graphics as BMP file
• Can export text and graphic with the clipboard
• Web update Wizard
• Communicate with Motherboard Monitor
• Dump (Hardware registers, System BIOS, video BIOS …)

Review:

PC Wizard is an utility for the detailed gathering of information about your PC. It can show both hardware and software information about your system like for example your motherboard model, brand of the CPU, multimedia codecs,Etc. There is also a wide variety of Benchmarking tools in which you can test your machine with tests for the CPU,RAM,hard drive,Etc. The results of these test can be compared with the results of various types of computers in order to check how strong or weak your PC is compared to them.
PC Wizard is fully portable so you can carry it in your pendrive and just works as it should. Available for all versions of Windows.

Get it at http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php

Benchmark your applications with AppTimer

Overview:

AppTimer will run an executable a number of times and time how long it takes for the application to reach a state where user input is being accepted before exiting the application.

After each run of the application AppTimer will attempt to close the application in an automated fashion while logging the time measurements to a log file.

It’s main use is in benchmarking an application’s startup time.

Review:

Have you ever wondered how much time a program takes to launch? if the answer if yes then you may be interested in AppTimer. With this lightweight and portable program you can launch applications to time their startup time and put the results into a text file. You can choose how many program executions and delay between launches you would like. The window detection method and the window close method are important because is the way Apptimer detects a windows and closes it respectively, i would pay special attention to the window close method since some programs don’t like to be closed a certain way which is something that i experienced.
AppTimer worked pretty well and should suffice people that need an app like it. Available for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista.

Get it at http://www.passmark.com/products/apptimer.htm

Check Your PC’s Ability to Run Games Online

Need to know whether or not your rig can handle the new game you’re eyeing up? Head over to System Requirements Lab and fire up Can You Run It.

The browser-based utility will check your hardware configuration against the requirements for the game you select and quickly tell you whether or not you’re good to go. The assessment runs very quickly (about 30 seconds) and provides both an overall mark and individual ratings for each component (cpu, ram, OS, video, hdd).

SRL already has an impressive list of games to rate against, including titles like Spore, Bioshock, GRID, and (sigh) Second Life. Speaking as a tech, this is a great way to quickly show a customer why their new game won’t run on their haggard old PC.

Can You Run It works in both Firefox and IE.