Instructions 

How to check which drive windows is installed on. How to find out the version and bitness of Windows. How to determine version by key

First, let's figure out what exactly we are going to learn. With the version, everything is a no brainer: it is indicated by the number present in the system name (relevant for Windows 10, as well as 8/8.1 and 7) or letter designation(XP or, for example, Vista).

This also works for server systems from Microsoft - for example, Windows Server 2012, and, of course, for other “old-school” operating systems in the line: Windows 95/98/ME (Millennium) and so on. The version also means the digital code of the installed assembly.

The operating system type, also called edition, determines the edition of Windows. Yes, yes, these are the same postscripts indicated after the system number: Home (Home), Pro (Professional) and so on. For example, in Windows 7, the Starter edition was a “stripped-down” inferior distribution with a lot of restrictions and was intended mainly for home use on not the most powerful computers and laptops. While Ultimate (Maximum) endowed the PC with increased security and provided more features - for example, the ability to join corporate network or even deploying a server. But we all mostly played solitaire and played Counter-Strike!..

In some understanding, the build number (English build) or, as it was called in Russian localization - system construction, determines the numerical identification program code, used in the current version of the operating system. As a rule, it is not necessary for the average user to know it. “Build” may be of interest to some developer who is testing his, say, game on the system of a specific build.

Architecture (bit capacity, bit Windows version) is a set of commands for interaction of the operating system with the central processor of an information device (laptop, tablet or computer, for example).

Microsoft operating systems support the following processor architectures:

  • ARM - in this moment used in the CPU of mobile devices;
  • x86 (also known as x32) - used in early processors from industry giant Intel;
  • x86-64 (another name is AMD64) - developed by AMD, is an extension to x86 and is used in almost all modern processors;
  • IA-64 - joint development HP and Intel, which was conceived as a 64-bit analogue of x86 for home computers and laptops, but after the release of x86-64 it did not find use (now it is used mainly in servers).

As mentioned above, most modern CPUs are based on the x86-64 architecture, which allows the user to install both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit versions of the system on the computer. In this case, the so-called Windows 64 will have important advantage before Windows 32 - support for a larger amount of RAM and physical memory and, as a result, higher performance and the ability to handle large amounts of data. In other words - 16 GB random access memory, installed on the computer, in a 32-bit system will be defined as 4, “in your hands” you will get no more than 3.5. So it goes.

How to find out the Windows version? See what is written on the installation disk of your OS.

If this is not possible, read the article further.

Find out the installed version and bitness of Windows through “Computer Properties”

The easiest way to find out what version of Windows is installed on your computer is to open its properties and look. To do this, open “Explorer”, find “This PC” (or “My Computer”, if you are using a system younger than Windows 10), click on the icon right click mouse and select “Properties” at the very bottom of the drop-down list. In the window that appears, you can see the version, release (type) and bit capacity of the system.

The method is preferred by most users. The only drawback is that there is no information about the system assembly.

How to determine the version and other OS parameters using the winver utility

The winver utility is used to collect and provide the user with information about the running system. To initialize, use the command window (go to “Start” - “Run” or press the Win and R key combination), in which enter the winver command as shown in the figure and click “OK”.

The Win key is usually located in the lower left corner of the keyboard!

The interface that opens will contain detailed data about the system. Except for the bit depth!

msinfo - all system information

Another way is to use the good old msinfo32 utility. In the “Run” window, enter msinfo32 , execute and admire the comprehensive result.

How to determine version by key

It is very easy to find out the Windows version by product activation key by using the official Volume Activation Management Tool 2.0 from Microsoft. Simply enter your productkey in the appropriate field and click the “Verify” button.

You can use the same method to find out which version it is from. Windows key, lying around in your desk drawer.

But what if the computer won't start?

This method is relevant for operating systems released before XP (including the latest), and allows you to determine the version of Windows by files, or more precisely, the prodspec.ini file, located at C:\Windows\System32.

The method will help people whose old computer does not boot, but it is necessary to find out which system is installed (for example, to restore the system itself or files). To do this, you need to download some RescueDisk or BootCD, then open the above file and find the line with the text - the data located next to it indicates the installed Windows distribution.

other methods

But if suddenly, for some reason, the above methods for determining the version of Windows on a laptop or computer did not suit you...

Find out the OS version via Windows CMD

The command line is the best friend of both the amateur beginner and the bearded one system administrator. Finding out the Windows version from the command line is simple: and enter the systeminfo command, which will almost instantly collect and provide you with detailed information about the system.

You can also use the systeminfo command in PowerShell.

Determine Windows version using the registry

The Windows registry also contains information about the installed OS. To access it, enter the regedit command in the same “Run”. Next, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion and find the necessary information.

How to programmatically detect Windows version

There are a large number of programs from third-party developers, the functionality of which allows you to determine installed system and collect information about it - for example, AIDA64. However, all such programs only use the built-in capabilities of the OS, which we wrote about above, so the advisability of using them for these purposes remains questionable.

How to find out the version of Windows recorded on a disk or flash drive

To find out the version of Windows on the installation disk or bootable flash drive, open the media through Explorer, find the setup.exe file, right-click on it and in context menu select Properties. In the file properties window that appears, go to the “Details” tab and pay attention to the “Product version” column.

How to find out the version of Windows Phone

Although the mobile version of the operating system from Microsoft has not found such widespread use as its desktop counterpart, it still raised a number of questions.

So if you want to find out which version Windows Phone installed on your gadget, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Start menu and swipe left to select Apps.
  2. Next “Settings”, “About device”, “More details”.

Here (in the “Software” column) you will see the name of the installed operating system (for example, Windows Phone 8). Additionally, you can find out the build version in the “OS Version” column.

The version of Windows CE (which, in fact, is a completely different OS and is used mainly in Chinese navigators) is determined in a similar way.

P.S

Thank you for reading our article to the end, thereby gaining the most complete understanding of how to find out the version and other parameters of your system. We hope you didn't do it in vain!

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Hello dear blog readers website. Today I want to tell you how you can find out the date Windows installations.

Why is this necessary? Let's say you buy new computer or a laptop from an advertisement, from friends, or they bring it to you from abroad. Without documents, you can check whether it is really new by looking at when the OS was installed. Although this will only make sense if the seller did not reinstall the system.

You may also need to find out the installation date of Windows if you periodically reinstall the system to clean it. Therefore, in order not to remember or write down the last time you reinstalled, you just need to look at this information on the computer itself.

And finally, you may be driven by ordinary curiosity.

And so, let's look at several ways to find out the code the system was installed:

Through folder properties

For each folder, you can see the time it was created. Therefore, using this opportunity, you can see when the Windows directory was created, and this, in turn, will be the time of installation of the system. For this:

  1. Open Explorer and go to the drive where the OS is installed. This is usually drive C.
  2. Find Windows folder, right-click on it and select Properties in the context menu.
  3. The system properties window will open, in which you can see when the OS was created.

There is one drawback to this method. The point is that, starting from Windows Vista, Microsoft has changed the system installation method and now during installation the files are extracted from the image installation disk. Those. in the properties window Windows directories It will not show the date and time of OS installation, but when the image for the installation disk was created.

What should Vista and later users do? There is a way out. The fact is that the creation time can be viewed for any folder on the computer. Those. you need to find directories that were not created by extracting the installation disk from the image, but were created in the usual way during OS installation or immediately after its completion. You can find many such folders, but the most simple example there will be a directory account the user created during installation (provided it was not deleted). It is located on drive C in the Users folder.

Right-click on the user's folder and select Properties and look at when it was created. IN in this example is a user named user. There may be several different user folders on your computer. See which one is the oldest.

Using the SystemInfo command

The method described above does not allow you to accurately determine the installation date, and may also cause some difficulties if you have a system installed that is later than XP.

But there is more exact way find out the Windows installation date using the command SystemInfo:

  1. Now enter SystemInfo and press Enter. After executing the command, a list with information about your system will be displayed on the screen.
  2. Scroll up this list and find the item " installation date" This will be the date and time of OS installation.

In order not to search for the required line in the list, you can run SystemInfo with the following parameters:

SystemInfo | find /i "date"

As a result of executing the command, lines containing the word “date” will be found. In our case, one line will be found “ installation date", which is what we need.

Using the WMIC command

There is another command that can be used to determine when the system was installed: WMIC(Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line).

  1. Run command line on behalf of the administrator.
  2. Enter WMIC with the following parameters:

WMIC OS GET installdate

As a result of executing the command, the required data will be displayed in the format: YearMonthDateHoursMinutesSeconds

In our example: 2013 is the year, 10 is the month, 17 is the day, 07 is the hour, 36 is the minute, 46 is the second.

Using Registry Editor

This method is somewhat more complicated than the previous ones, but, as they say, we are not looking for easy ways, so we will consider it too:

1. Launch the “Run” window (Windows key combination + R), then enter regedit and press the Enter key.

2. After launching the Registry Editor window, go to the following section in the folder tree on the left:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

3. On the right side of the window you need to find a parameter called “ InstallDate”

4. This parameter contains the number of seconds that have passed from January 1, 1970 to the date the system was installed. So, if you want, you can spend a little time and find out the necessary information. But I don't think that makes any sense, and this method described for general development purposes only.

That's all. Now, I think you can easily find out the Windows installation date by choosing the best method for yourself.

Users who have purchased a pre-assembled PC or laptop often do not know which drive is installed on their computer. In this article we will look at several simple ways how to determine the drive type in operating system Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10.

How to find out SSD or HDD in Windows 10

If you are using an operating room Windows system 8 or , then you can find out which disk is on your computer in just a couple of mouse clicks. To do this, open the Start menu or press the combination Windows-S keys(if you have Windows 8) and enter the word “Defragmentation” into the search.

The program “and optimizing your drives” should appear in the search results. Open it and you will see a list of all the drives that are installed on your computer. In this case, next to each of these disks the type will be indicated. of this disk, SSD or HDD.

If " Solid State Drive", then this is SSD, and if " ", then HDD.

How to find out SSD or HDD in Windows 7

If you use the Windows 7 operating system or the method described above did not suit you for some reason, then you can determine which disk is on your computer using third party programs. For example, you can use the program. Run this program on your computer, go to the “Drives” section and select the drive whose type you need to define as SSD or HDD.

If this drive is hard drive, that is, HDD, then on the right side of the window, in the “Media Rotation Rate” line, its rotation speed will be indicated (for example, 7200 RPM).

If the drive is a solid-state drive, that is, then in the “Media Rotation Rate” line it will be written “SSD Drive (Non-ratation)”.

You can also see what drive is installed on your computer using the program. Run this program on your computer and pay attention to the data in the “Storage” block. There will be information about all drives that are connected to the PC.

In this case, there will be a corresponding mark next to the solid-state drives (SSDs).

If it is not possible to install these programs, then you can simply find out the name of the disk model and search for information about it on the Internet. In order to use this option, you need to open “Device Manager”. It can be done different ways, the simplest and most universal is to press the combination Windows-R keys and run the command “mmc devmgmt.msc”.

In the "Device Manager" window, open the "Disk Devices" section. Here you will see a list of all the drives on your computer.

Enter the title the desired disk to any search engine and study information about it. This way you can easily determine the type SSD drive or HDD.

Hello, dear readers! Today I will share with you a couple of methods that will help answer the question of how to find out the installation date of Windows 7.

For the sake of sport or in pursuit of some specific goals, sometimes we have to ask ourselves: When did Windows settle on the hard drive? It's not at all difficult to find out.

So way number one is where we will be use standard means Windows.
To do this you need:

Press “Win” + “R” or go to “Start” and select “Run”. In the window that appears, enter the command “cmd” and click “OK”.

In the next window enter the command systeminfo and press “Enter”.

Now let's look at the information that interests us.

This command shows not only the Windows installation date, but also a lot of other interesting information.

The second method: to do this, go to local disk“C:\”, find the “Windows” folder there, right-click on it and in the “General” tab look at the date of its creation.

You can, of course, use various utilities that collect complete data about the operating system and computer, but I don’t see any practical sense in this. Why install programs that you will only need once? Now you know how to find out the installation date of Windows 7, and you can do it without any programs!

See you soon!

Hello, my dear readers! The other day I was going to install Windows 7 and then a small hitch arose: I had a disk with Windows, but I forgot to sign it right away and now I’m puzzled by how I can find out the version of the system that is recorded there? Is this a familiar problem? I managed to solve this problem and now I will tell you how to determine the version of windows 7 by files on disk(as well as bit depth).

Insert your disc into the drive. If the installer window appears, close it, we don't need it. We go to the disk through Explorer or through Total Commander and see a list of files. Perhaps you have instead physical disk only him iso image, but the essence does not change.

Our task: to determine the version and Windows bit depth 7.

So, let's begin our investigation. We go to the sources folder and there we look for a file with the name ei.cfg. When we find it, select it and open it for viewing. In total commander, you can press F3 or F4 (edit mode) to view. In Explorer, right-click on the file ei.cfg and select Edit with Notepad++ (if you still don’t have it, then I recommend correcting this misunderstanding and installing it).

Inside the file we see something like this:

The section says the Windows version, in this case Home Premium. But this is not enough; we are also interested in the bit depth of the system. To do this, let's look at another file. It is located in the same sources folder and is called idwbinfo.txt. We open it similarly to the first file and see the contents:

In this section we can glean the missing information and put together the puzzle. The line BuildArch=x86 means that the system is 32-bit. In case, a 64-bit entry might look like amd64.

The BuildBranch line tells us that Service Pack 1 is integrated into our 32-bit Home Premium system.

So, we solved the problem and determined the version, bit depth and, as a bonus, the presence of a service pack. And now, so as not to forget again, we take a special felt-tip pen and sign it on the disk: Windows Home Premium x86 SP1. That's all:)

P.S.: If you or someone you know has special equipment with TD226B-6G or WP6 engines, then you can view and order the Deutz spare parts necessary to repair them.