Best Tool to clone/detect system environment for setup/development testing?

Question

we develop web apps which are tied to biztalk and usually require setup and web config updates on the client side. the problem that I'm seeing quite often is that our own testing/setup would be fine and dandy but when we try to deploy the setup to the client side we sometimes stumble upon weird issues.

Questions:

1. I'm just wondering if there's some tools that I can use to check what hardware/special software that are installed on the client server/virtual server setup that might produce a list of hardware/software.
2. and also if there's something so powerful that I can use to clone an problematic environment so that we can reproduce the same error and fix it on our side.

thanks.

Answer 1

Everest Ultimate Edition is a great tool for detailed hardware information on a system. If you just want to pull a software list you just need something to query the right reg keys (something like this will give you a nice list to manage, though the code is old, it is still probably easy to edit to get up to date if needed).