In Windows XP, how can I get a list of all my hardware components as a text file?

Question

I'll be putting Linux on my old Lenovo T60p laptop and I would like to have a list of all of the hardware in it, so that if I need to manually hunt down drivers, I have all of the make and model information for all the parts in my computer. Is there a way in Windows XP to export this list directly to a text file?

Answer 1

Download and run SIW - System Information for Windows

Under Hardware, expand Devices

Then go to File > Create Report File > TXT

For good measure, do the same with PCI

SIW is freeware and portable.

Answer 2

From Microsoft's The DevCon command-line utility functions as an alternative to Device Manager:

The DevCon utility is a command-line utility that acts as an alternative to Device Manager. Using DevCon, you can enable, disable, restart, update, remove, and query individual devices or groups of devices. DevCon also provides information that is relevant to the driver developer and is not available in Device Manager.

See Using Devcon for more info.

You may therefore use :

devcon classes

to see which device classes are available, then use :

devcon listclass USB

to list all USB devices on the computer.

You can also list all devices at once in a quite voluminous listing.