Chuck's Corner
How Do I Find My System Specs?
At some point you may need to ask a question in one of the forums. Something isn't quite working right and you need an answer. You post your question and the first response to you is another question, 'What are your system specs?'. You may wonder why this is even important, or what it has to do with your problem. The truth is that many problems are caused by a system problem or inadequate system specifications.
So how do you find all of the pertinent specifications?
DirectX Diagnostic Tool
The first place to find most of your system information is here. The DirectX Diagnostic Tool will give you just about everything you will need. From the bottom right of your screen press the Start button, then select Run.
This will open the Run dialog box.
In the available space, next to the word ‘Open:’ type ‘dxdiag’ as shown above. Then press the OK button to open the DirectX Diagnostic Tool.
You will notice many tabs at the top of the tool window, we are only concerned with two of these tabs; System and Display 1. Above you see what information is available under the System tab. For purposes of reporting your specs to the forum you will need to know the Manufacturer, Model, Processor, and Memory.
Next click on the Display 1 tab, that will open the screen containing information about your display adapter.
Here you will need the; Name, Chip Type and Approx. Total Memory.
This is a very good place to look for system information if someone asks you to provide details about most any part of your computer system. There is a whole lot more available than just the little we just looked at. There is also information about your sound card, network and even tests that can be run to verify that you system is operating efficiently.
Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management
One thing that is not available in the DirectX Diagnostic Tool is your hard drive information. In most cases this is the only other information that someone in a forum might ask for. To find your hard drive information open the Windows Control Panel (Start/Control Panel). With the Control Panel open, double click on Administrative Tools, then again on Computer Management, this is what you will see:
Now click on Disk Management and something similar to this will appear:
The information above is most of what you will need to know. The first two partitions are specifically for the windows and the running of your computer, they are a FAT partition and a FAT32 partition, this is normal. Below that will be the hard drive space that is available to you, and your computer, for files and programs. As you can see there are two disk drives, C and D, each with the NTFS file system. C is 146.21gb and has 109.48gb free, D is 149.01gb and has 91.83gb free. These are both 160gb drives so where is the rest of the space, taken up by page files and other Windows system files. This space is not available to be used by anything other than the operating system.
Other information can be gathered by clicking on My Computer with your right mouse button and selecting Properties. This will open the System Properties dialog box.
You will notice seven tabs, the first being the General tab. This will also tell you the Manufacturer, Model, Processor and RAM for your system. If you click on the Hardware tab
and then the Device Manager button
you will be able to see much more information about your system. As an example, under Disk drives I have clicked on the + to expand the view and now can see 3 disk drives. The first is my printer that has a built in multi disk port for digital camera disks, the second is a 160gb Maxtor drive, and the 3rd a 160gb Western Digital drive.
Do not make any changes to the configuration in Device Manager unless you know what you are doing. Changes to your hardware could cause serious problems, even complete system failure. Please consult an expert before making any changes in Device Manager.
A couple of performance tweaks
Close Device Manager so we can go back to the System Properties dialog box. Once you are back to the System Properties click on the Advanced tab.
This will open the Performance Options dialog box. We will only be concerned with two of the three tabs and only a couple of the settings. For video editing we want to get the best performance possible; under the Visual Effects tab select ‘Adjust for best performance’. Then click on the Advanced tab.
In this dialog box you will adjust the Processor scheduling and Memory usage. For both options choose Programs, this will give programs priority over Background services and System cache.
These two little tweaks will give your system a slight edge when working with programs like Premiere Elements.
January 2006
About Chuck
Chuck Engels grew up in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois and moved to northern Wisconsin at the age of 17. He graduated from Trans American School of Broadcasting in Wausau, Wisconsin. He worked in the radio industry for five years; KMRS/KKOK Morris, Mn, KLQP Madison, Mn, and KBRF Fergus Falls, Mn, and studied theater and film at the University of Minnesota-Morris (Chuck won a few awards for a college video production in 1982-1983). Chuck has spent the past 18 years in the transportation industry, in management, and in software development.
Chuck has also been very involved in Senior League Baseball, managing and playing in a 35 and over league for 4 years and coaching Little League Baseball since 1982. He has been playing baseball since he was 7 and continues to play as often as he can, now at the age of 49. He currently lives near Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife and three of their four children.
He is a senior programmer and analyst in the software development department for AFC Worldwide Express. Chuck is also involved in the media department for Trinity Chapel, a 10,000-member church, and is an active member and regular contributor to the Adobe Premiere Elements Users Forum. Chuck also hosts a website where users can share their videos, tips, and tricks chuckengels.com/PremierVideo as well as a site that involves 3 other forum members; Steve Grisetti, TikiTim, and Ed Mann videoinasnap.com.
