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The MS-DOS era is gone, there is no doubt about that, but it's quite amazing to see that few programs live on even today. For example, WinRar still comes with a command-line unpacker, and this is not the only program that keeps the DOS heritage alive. System Analyser, the program we'll talk about today, is a 15 years old software that detects all hardware in your computer, giving detailed information about every device you can think of.


Setup

System Analyser's last version is 5.3r, its release date being the 27th of June. Practically, there's no setup package and no installation that you should take care of. The files of the 14 days trial version come inside a ZIP archive that has a size of only 241kb, so no matter how slow your Internet connection is, downloading it shouldn't be a problem. Once the archive is properly saved on your hard drive, unpack all the files to a folder and run the file called SA53S.COM.


Interface
As you can expect, there's not much to ask from this program when talking about its interface. People that starting using computers in the second half of the last decade of later will consider System Analyser to be a really "antique" piece of code, in terms of looks and user interaction. There are no cute icons, no toolbars, not even a menu as you are used to see in most Windows programs these days, but...


Features

...unlike many Windows programs, that promise a lot and fail to accomplish those promises, System Analyser does exactly what it should. As you can see in the screenshots below, there is a lot of detailed information about the hardware devices of your computer to be obtained with this program, and sometimes this can prove useful for troubleshooting purposes too.

If you pay attention to the interface, you'll notice that in the bar at the bottom of the screen, some letters are yellow. These are the shortcut letters leading to a certain area/feature of the program, such as Save, Print or Next (page). These being said, I will add the fact that System Analyser is not Vista compatible at this time, but you can use it with old MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 computers, being just as effective as with the latest PCs running Windows XP.


The Good

System Analyser is a cheap software with a very long history behind that does its job and can be easily included on a bootable CD/DVD used for troubleshooting or initial system setup/testing.

The Bad

No matter how nice it is for me to remember the MS-DOS years, this program looks ancient today, and probably a move into the GUI area would be a wise choice.

Conclusion

As long as I can grab EVEREST or SiSoft's Sandra, I won't spend my money on any program like System Analyser, but don't get me wrong - I am sure that certain people, especially computer technicians, can take full advantage of this 12$ application.

Developer: Hans Niekus
Price: 12$
Trial Link: Download