Intended Audience: Windows 10 Users
Last Update: 2017-10-06
Utility: Working Solution
If you want to know if a new software will run well on your computer or if you are considering buying a new machine, it can be useful to find out how powerful the hardware of your Windows 10 system is. Here is a simple way to do that:
Click on the looking glass icon in the lower left corner of the Windows 10 desktop screen:
In the "Search Windows" box start typing "System Information":
Click on the highlighted "System Information" desktop app. This will start a program that shows you many details about your computer.
Make sure that "System Summary" is selected on the left. Then click somewhere on the right side. With Ctrl+A you can select all content on the right. Ctrl+C will copy it to a buffer and with Ctrl+V you can paste this information wherever you like, an e-mail, Skype, a document, etc.
Besides the type of CPU and the amount of RAM, the storage drive used in your computer has a big impact on how fast it runs. So open "Components" and "Storage" on the left, then select "Drives". On the right you find all the details about your storage drives. Again, you can simply copy and paste this information if you want to send it to your friendly support person.
Once you know what your hardware is, you can compare it to what is currently being sold on the market. Is your hardware really that much slower? Often it is not the hardware that makes your computer slow but bloated software and malware. I always first tune the software.
If the computer still does not perform well, I check whether adding more RAM might make sense (I consider 4 GB RAM the minimum these days). [RAM stands for "random access memory", it is fast but all its contents are lost when the power is turned off. Programs that deal with a lot of data, like videos or graphics, require more RAM.]
Upgrading from a harddisk drive (HDD, rotating magnetic platters) to a solid state drive (SSD, just electronics, no moving mechanical parts) will always give you a big performance boost. But this is more complicated than upgrading RAM.