The Ultimate Guide To Your PC's CPU And What It Can Do

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Most PCs nowadays can run pretty much all software.  But sometimes there are exceptions, when a particular product requires your CPU to have a particular capability.  This is especially true in the area of virtualization, where running separate operating systems in individual windows generally requires your CPU to have a hardware virtualization feature present.

If you're not sure what features your CPU has, or if you just want to learn about those it does have, look no further than a freebie called CoreInfo, from the Sysinternals team at Microsoft.  You can download the program from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/cc835722.aspx and it's less than 1 MB.  The program is malware-free according to VirusTotal and Web of Trust.  Once downloaded, just unzip it and run it from a command prompt.  The output will tell you all you could ever want to know about your CPU, including its precise model number, speed, and features.  On a multi-core processor, you even get details of each core's individual capabilities.

 

 

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Comments

My preferred tool is cpu-z, from http://www.cpuid.com/ . It doesn't tell you what all those various instructions mean, but on the other hand it is a GUI application.

My preference too. Another important benefit is that many hardware/system websites use cpu-z as their standard tool for detecting CPU information. So the knowledge we build up while using it can be used more widely.

toktok & yrralrellim:

Thanks for you help. Got it to run after changing .exe file to C directory and following toktok command suggestions.
Of course I forgot which command worked so I have to do it over again and make a note.

If you just type coreinfo it may run very shortly in a DOS window, then disappear.
yrralrellim's advice may lead to the same.
But if you open a cmd line window (DOS window), you can run it.
To do so, click Start, type cmd (in the Search field), click cmd.exe, go to the directory where you have the coreinfo file (e.g. C:\ as yrralrellim suggests). You may have to type cd \ or cd c:\ to go to C:\
Then type coreinfo.

What command, if any, can I use to "PRINT" the info to a text file please?

You can redirect the text (console-mode) output to a text file by appending ">" and a file name for the text. You can run the program from any folder by entering the folder path before the program name. If you can see the program file in Windows Explorer then you can right-click on it to get the context menu, select "Properties", and select and copy the "Location" information. For example, on my computer "coreinfo.exe" is unzipped to the folder "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Sysinternals". To run it and redirect output to a text file I create the following command: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Sysinternals\Coreinfo.exe" > coreinfo.txt Note: 1. I enclosed the program path and name in quotes because the commmand-line interpreter normally treats everything after the first space as parameters (additional options or settings). 2. I didn't have to type in the complete path because I had copied the file location as described above. To paste it into the command line I right-click and select paste. 3. You can also copy the text output directly from the display rather than redirecting to a text file. To do this right-click and select "Mark". Then display the start or end of the text you want to copy, select the text you want (you can scroll up or down in the window as you select), and press the Enter key to copy it. 4. If I want to create a batch file so I can run the command again then I would type the following lines of text to copy the text from the console input (con) into the a text file that I can run (ci.bat) by typing "ci" . The "^Z" ends input to the batch file and is entered by pressing F6 or Ctrl+Z: copy con ci.bat "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Sysinternals\Coreinfo.exe" > coreinfo.txt ^Z

You left out nothing here and for sure you know the correct terminology. Thanks much!!

It installed and ran easily on my machine, but I got nothing like the info you got out of it. It was very minimal and not helpful at all.

I downloaded and unzipped the coreinfo file. I ran the command prompt "coreinfo" as per the instructions,but my system (Win 7x64) does not recognize the command. Help, please

"coreinfo' command must be within the correct directory. MOVE coreinfo.exe to the C:\drive. Change directory in window to the c:\ drive and it will run.