avo has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks,

I have been searching the web for a module / wrapper to do a comprehensive computer hardware information. I am looking for most possible info of a PC running Win32. For example: Memory, CPU type and speed, PCI Bus cards and vendors, PCMCIA cards, Vendors: HDD, Video, chipset, etc. I think one can utilize a good console application to provide these and obviously parse the output, but I haven't met a good open source one so far. Please help.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Perl Hardware Info on Win32
by Corion (Patriarch) on Nov 26, 2006 at 19:28 UTC

    The WMI provides much of that information, and you can access it through my module, DBD::WMI.

Re: Perl Hardware Info on Win32
by NetWallah (Canon) on Nov 26, 2006 at 22:34 UTC
    A pre-invented, customizable, free wheel exists, at OCS Inventory.

         "A closed mouth gathers no feet." --Unknown

Re: Perl Hardware Info on Win32
by bingos (Vicar) on Nov 27, 2006 at 08:28 UTC

    A lot of that kind of information is available through SNMP if the Win32 SNMP agent is installed. This has the advantage that the querying machine can be any OS not necessarily MSWin32.

    The Net-SNMP project provides some useful tools and there is of course a perl module.

    The Nagios Exchange website has some MSWin32 SNMP scripts for querying things like CPU, memory, etc. that you can use to get an idea.