System Information X is a small, free and portable tool which can quickly deliver some detailed information about the PC on which it's being run.

This can be very detailed. System Information X doesn't only tell you which processor is on a system, for instance. It also displays more than 70 features of CPUs and lets you know which are available in this particular case.

And you also get information on many other aspects of your system - RAM, motherboard, graphics card, monitor, storage devices, audio, network interfaces and more - all conveniently displayed in an Explorer-type tree view. Which can then be conveniently saved to a report for easy viewing later.

There are occasional issues in how all this data is presented. Giving our video card RAM as "-2147483648" wasn't exactly helpful (although fortunately a "(-2048)" afterwards gives a better idea of the true figure.

Still, System Information X does supply a lot of genuinely useful information, and it's extremely portable: the program runs on every version of Windows from 2000 through to 8.1. It's also completely free, no adware or similar hassles, so if you're interested in a program like this then you can try it without any problems.