Use Advanced Remote Info to inventory hardware and software on a LAN

When it comes to the economy, Information Technology departments are not strangers to cost cutting. Throughout the industry, IT management, technicians, programmers, and system administrators are reviewing their expenses and processes in order to reduce expenses while keeping their systems running.

While there are still many that hold fast to commercial software, other are looking to open source or freeware solutions to help keep day to day operations fiscally sound.

There are many freely available utilities out on the Internet to assist IT departments in keeping within their budgets. One type of duty that anyone on a technical staff will encounter is remote computer management. With more geographically diverse computers, than in years past, technicians need to be able to get information from a computer without the need for physical access.

Advanced Remote Info combines two jobs into one package. Firstly, one can scan a computer and read all of the hardware information from it, and get a list of currently installed software. This is helpful when there is the need to take inventory on computers connected via LAN, WAN, or VPN.  Secondly, Advanced Remote Info has a variety of computer management tools, and shortcuts to other Windows functions.

After getting Advanced Remote Info installed, your first task will be to select a target computer. This is done by entering the IP address, or DNS name, of the computer to be scanned. Left-click on the arrow button to initiate the scan.

The first bit of information you, in the General Requirements section, will notice is the ping response. If you do not receive a ping response, the target machine may have a firewall preventing ping responses or simply be turned off. If it is a Windows type computer, there will be a Yes in the Is Windows box.

Providing you have a good scan, to the right of the General Requirements area is additional hardware information from the scanned computer. This data includes pertinent information such as the BIOS date, BIOS version, CPU (Processor) type and speed, the amount of installed RAM memory, as well as the computer’s MAC address. This section also shows the Windows version, and currently installed service pack release.

Now that we have an understanding of what type of hardware data we can glean from a computer scan, let’s move on to the additional data and control functions. Looking towards the bottom of the Advanced Remote Info window, you will notice a set of tabs.  The initial view is the Overview tab. Clicking on the Processes tab will bring up the running processes on the target computer. You can stop a process from this screen, or start one if you know the executable file’s path (C:\Program Files\…..).

The next tab, Services, is for viewing a computer’s services.  Here you have the ability to start and stop services on the computer in question. This can come in handy if the target machine is having specific problems with a service that is causing lock-ups or other issues.

Following the Services tab, we have the Drives tab. This screen displays the drive format type (NTFS, FAT32, etc.), the total size of a hard disk, and the amount of free space available. If someone is calling for computer assistance because of low disk space, after you scan their terminal, this is one area that can help with this issue.

Want to know what the computer currently has for software? You can click on the Software tab and view all of the installed software. This is a handy tool for spot checking end user troubleshooting, should someone be uncertain as to what version of, say, Microsoft Office they have.

Additionally, you can click on a button in the lower left-hand corner of this section to alter the view to show which software can be uninstalled from the scanned computer.

The Shares tab section displays what share folders are currently active on a computer.  This tab is of particular interest because it not only shows what drives and folders are currently shared on the scanned computer, but the hidden system shares as well. This is also useful for spot checking the hidden system shares and keeping track of ones that need to be turned off for security purposes.

For those of us that like to troubleshoot computers using tools such as Remote Desktop and the Event Viewer, the Tools menu has a consolidated list of these utilities, as well as others. The Windows type utilities are located under the External Tools section of the Tools menu.

In addition to Remote Desktop and Event Viewer, a Registry Editor, the Telnet and the Traceroute consoles are available. There are also some non-traditional Windows tools such as a NMap scan (this does require the installation of NMap) and displaying an XP installation CD key.

Advanced Remote Info can collect quite a bit of data. It is entirely possible that you may only need a small subset of information gathered by one of these computer scans. Even so, having the ability to get the extra data when needed is always helpful, and the price should fit within any budget. Advanced Remote Info is a great utility in any system administrator’s tool set.