Kiwi System Info is a compact and portable tool which provides a great deal of very in-depth information on your PC.

The program organises its data into 7 main areas, each of which has a toolbar icon: "Hardware Info", "Data Storage", "Memory", "System Info", "Network", "User & Security" and "Developer".

And each of these areas has a number of categories which you can choose to view. So "Hardware Info" includes "BIOS", "Printer" and "Processor", for instance; "Data Storage" has "DiskDrive", "DiskPartition" and "LogicalDisk"; and "System Information" gives us "Account", "Process", "Service" and so on.

One problem you'll notice immediately is that many of these categories are highly technical, and won't mean much to the average user (CIMLogicalDeviceCIMDataFile, HeatPipe, PNPEntity and so on).

And even when you select a more basic category, it generally isn't presented very well. So when we clicked "DiskDrive" on our test system, for instance, we found "Size" was specified as "256052966400". Which isn't very helpful.

The reason for this is that Kiwi System Information is grabbing all its data directly from the operating system, via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). This makes it very easy to create the program, as Windows tells you exactly what to display (which is why the entire program is just a single 388KB executable). But the down side is that you'll inevitably get a great deal of complicated details which most people will never need at all.

If you just want a system to give you the basics, then - how many drives, their free space, what graphics card do you have, say - Kiwi System Info really isn't for you.

But, if occasionally you need to know far more low-level details, then grab a copy of the program. It'll take up very little disk space, and one day just might prove very useful indeed.