Speccy, developed by Piriform Software, is a

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

utility software Utility software is software designed to help analyze, configure, optimize or maintain a computer. It is used to support the computer infrastructure - in contrast to application software, which is aimed at directly performing tasks that benefit ord ...

and runs under Microsoft

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...

Vista Vista usually refers to a distant view. Vista may also refer to: Software *Windows Vista, the line of Microsoft Windows client operating systems released in 2006 and 2007 * VistA, (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) ...

and XP for both

IA-32 IA-32 (short for "Intel Architecture, 32-bit", commonly called i386) is the 32-bit version of the x86 instruction set architecture, designed by Intel and first implemented in the 80386 microprocessor in 1985. IA-32 is the first incarnation of ...

and

x64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mo ...

versions of these

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s, which shows the user information about hardware and

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

of the computer. The information displayed by Speccy includes

processor Processor may refer to: Computing Hardware * Processor (computing) **Central processing unit (CPU), the hardware within a computer that executes a program *** Microprocessor, a central processing unit contained on a single integrated circuit (I ...

brand and model,

hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...

size and speed, amount of memory (

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

), information about

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

and operating system. Speccy is used to monitor what hardware is present in a system and how it is being used.

Lifehacker ''Lifehacker'' is a weblog about life hacks and software that launched on January 31, 2005. The site was originally launched by Gawker Media and is currently owned by G/O Media. The blog posts cover a wide range of topics including: Microsoft W ...

stated in 2009 that among similar tools, Speccy was the "cleanest and most detailed one we've used yet".

Download Squad Weblogs, Inc. was a blog network that published content on a variety of subjects, including tech news, video games, automobiles and pop culture. At one point, the network had as many as 90 blogs, although the vast majority of its traffic could be ...

described the software as "

hough Hough may refer to: * Hamstringing, or severing the Achilles tendon of an animal * the leg or Tibia, shin of an animal (in the Scots language), from which the dish potted hough is made * Hough (surname) Communities United Kingdom * Hough, Alderle ...

not as detailed as some other system information tools, Speccy still provides a good deal of essential information and gathers it quickly". In 2010,

PC World ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tech ...

stated that the beta test version "gives you a remarkable amount of technical detail" that is "more comprehensive than other tools like

Systeminfo In computing, systeminfo, is a command-line utility included in Microsoft Windows versions from Windows XP onwards and in ReactOS. Overview The command produces summary output of hardware/software operating environment parameters. The detailed con ...

". In its 2012 review

Softpedia Softpedia is a software and tech news website based in Romania. It indexes, reviews and hosts various downloadable software and reports news on technology and science topics. Website Softpedia hosts reviews written by its staff—each review in ...

rated version 1.24.632 four stars (of five). As of

version 1511 released in November 2015, Speccy versions 1.28.709 and before are automatically uninstalled after downloading the update. Speccy 1.29.714 was released on 3 December to restore Speccy to Windows 10 after the November update.Speccy Update Fixes Windows 10 Issues, Will No Longer Be Removed During November Update Install
. Softpedia.

References

Windows-only freeware 2010 software Utilities for Windows Piriform Software Gen Digital software {{Windows-software-stub

See also

References