Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 04:43:24 +0800 (GMT)
From: Orlando Andico <orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph>
To: ProfComput AT aol DOT com
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: dignostic application
In-Reply-To: <970130090955_1246007228@emout02.mail.aol.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.93.970131043511.3165A-100000@gibson.eee.upd.edu.ph>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Thu, 30 Jan 1997 ProfComput AT aol DOT com wrote:

> 
> Good morning, I am looking for a program that can tell me what is inside of a
> computer, hard drive size, CPU size and speed, total RAM, and if it has a
> modem, sound card, and what type of video card it has.   I would like this
> for not only PC's but a program for the MAC and Unix machines.   I don't want
> to install this program on the computer so if it could be one just one (1)
> disk that would be even better.  I sure hope you can help me with this.
> 

Are you serious? (REALLY!)
I know there are lots of programs out there for detecting peripherals,
etc, on PC's (example: NDiags) but they're not perfect. Writing a program
to detect _everything_ on a PC would be an enormous task (but: to detect
serial chip, memory, hard drive, sound card, etc, the Linux kernel does
this pretty well). To detect video card (including chipset) SciTech UniVBE
does an excellent job (but: you can't get their source).

I know nothing about Macs.

For Unix, another big ???
Pretty hard, I would think, because every Unix vendor has their own
hardware support. For Solaris, my best guess would be, look through the
`dmesg' output -- Solaris 2.x autosenses all installed hardware and puts
it in the kernel log.

The only other Unix I use is SGI. Don't know how the hardware is detected,
probably a kernel function. But it's highly VENDOR DEPENDENT. And there
are SO many Unix flavors out there that trying to cover them all would be
a hopeless task. But each (Unix) vendor does a pretty good job of
detecting their own proprietary hardware, so it isn't much of a problem
(and besides, Unix users generally are more informed than DOS users and
know what their machines have).

and another thing: you can't have ONE disk for all those computers.. 
true, most Unix boxes can read DOS disks, but very few of them can _run_
DOS programs, so you'd have the additional joy of providing binaries for
each Unix flavor (unless you use something Unix boxes have in common,
like the Bourne shell.. but that would not work for MSDOS or Macs..) 

> Thank you for your time,
> 
> Jo Anne M.
> Lanham, Maryland
> 


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| Orlando Andico                email: orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph |
| IRC Lab/EE Dept/UP Diliman   http://gibson.eee.upd.edu.ph/~orly |
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