Software - for hardware audit

[The Receptionist]

the boss wants me to write a report on what hardware is where,
he wants details like hard drives, ram - physical nuts and bolts,

to this end he is going to give me a laptop and send me out to all our sites,
some 20 sites with 5 to 50 computers at each one

INSTEAD of manually crawling around the bowels of each pc, and copying data from system reports and so on

IS THERE a piece of software that i can put on the machine and generate a report?

and if it could outpput the data into a useable format for a database that would be good too

many thanks

[Lemur]

I don't suppose running dxidag would do the trick?

How about CPU-Z? Would that give you enough info to satisfy the bean-counter?

-edit-

I know for a fact that both Xiahou and Whacker are full-time IT wonks. Hey you guys! What would you use for a scenario like this? Anything he can use remotely?

[Xiahou]

Belarc Advisor springs to mind. It's free for personal use and they offer "enterprise" solutions that can gather data from remote PCs to a central location. I've never used the networked version, but it sounds like it might fit the bill.

[Husar]

SiSoft Sandra seems to be a powerful tool to find out what hardware a computer has, but then I never really used it myself and don't know about reports or statistics.

[barvaz]

If your machines are running Windows I can recommend System Information for Windows

It is like all the diagnostic and auditing utilities in one application. It gives you information about all your hardware (CPU, HDs, motherboard, memory etc), OS, drivers, software installed and much more.

It doesn't need installation, just copy the exe and run. Has report exports to CSV, HTML, XML.

It is free for non-commercial use but to use it in a corporate, you will need to buy it (75$ for unlimited version).

I always carry a copy with me around in my portable drive and CD case.

- barvaz

[Lemur]

Is any of this useful, Receptionist?