Right Click Tool Highlight: System Information – Device Mode

Over the past 7 years of being a ConfigMgr admin and having the Right Click Tools at my finger tips, one of them stands out as my most used tool: System Information.  I’d consider this single Right Click Tool a Swiss Army Knife in your pocket.

You can run this tool on both individual Machines or on entire collections, as shown above it was run on my HP Laptop Device.  This tool has made improvements overtime, and I’m quite sure will continue to have tweaks in the future.

As you see, you get a nice overview of the machine, both OS & Hardware info in the General Tab.  I’d often use this to confirm the BIOS Version right after I’d push a deployment to the test machine.  Since this is data is pulling straight from the machine, you get instant results without having to wait for Hardware Inventory.

The Add/Remove Programs tab gives you a listing of the “Legacy” Applications installed.  I’d often use this to remove rough / unapproved apps.  The Rough app issue became much smaller once we setup AppLocker, but we still had some devs with local admin rights who liked to abuse things.  This too is a nice spot check to make sure a machine updated Chrome / etc with the latest version you’re deploying.  IT also provides the Uninstall String if available.  I’d use this often to grab uninstall strings for scripting uninstalls to push out.

Windows Update, you guessed it, shows a list of installed updates, then allows you to link to the KB.  Once again, I’d use this to confirm my ADRs were pushing updates to my Test group and that it was getting installed without having to wait for reporting to catch up.  Also if you get a report from your security team of a machine missing patches, you can confirm / deny pretty quickly.

Services Tab gives a list of all Services, with options to Stop (If Running), Start (if Stopped) and set the Startup Type.  This is handy when troubleshooting client issues, and you need to stop a service while you do some remote troubleshooting. This was also helpful if I was looking at a known-issue machine I received a ticket on, I could look for rouge services, perhaps malware, or look for services that should be running and aren’t,  and vise-versa.

Drivers tab.. yep, as you can see the tab names are pretty self explanatory. I found this handy to confirm that a machine would get the drivers applied that I had in my driver packages for OSD / IPU.

User Profiles Tab shows a list of all profiles.  I’ve seen machines with hundreds of profiles (Computer Lab Machines / Shared PCs).  Now you can use GPO to have profiles auto clean up after X days, and I’d recommend doing that for several situations.  I found this tool handy when I was trying to manually clean up a machine with low disk space.  Your Service Desk will probably find this helpful too, they can remove their own profile from machines after they remoted to machines to assist users, or resolve issues.

Quickly check which users are in which groups, and remove someone if needed.  Once again, handy on machines as a quick confirmation no funny business is going on with the admin group.

Lastly, the Battery Page.  Ever think about kicking off a large deployment on a laptop and was like… sure hope it’s plugged in or has a lot of battery, take a quick glance here to make sure you’re not causing a bigger problem by kicking off that deployment (Rerun Deployment Right Click Tool).

Bonus Tips… COPY & PASTE.. EVERYTHING.  Pastes really nicely into Excel as well.

Personal Pros:  It gets information real-time by connecting to the machine and pulling back the info, so it’s not limited to waiting on hardware inventory.

Personal Cons: It’s Real-time, meaning if the machine is off, no data.  Typically this wasn’t a huge deal, WOL (using another Right Click Tool) would wake the machines up and I could get the info.

Conclusion: Right Click Tools System Information Tool Single Device Mode

Overall, I love this tool and use it a ton as a CM admin (often being 3rd tier support for Service Desk) and back when I was on the Service desk.  This one tool pretty much gives you a complete picture of the machine in question with the ability to do some basic tasks all in one spot.

Interested in giving it a try? Download the endpoint management software- Right Click Tools and test drive the System Information Tool and over 80 others.