Sometimes we have to generate a system information details report so that we can share it with technicians when consulting them for system upgrades or troubleshooting. They can look at the system information reports and find out about the system hardware components, settings and software installed without physically examining your Windows PC.
For creating a system information report, we can use a third-party application such as Speccy. But if you do not want to use a third-party application, then you can use MSInfo32 which is a tool built inside Windows 11. Here is how easy it is to generate a system information report using MSInfo32:
- Right-click anywhere on your desktop and from the right-click context-menu, select Open in Windows Terminal.
- In the Terminal window, give the following command: msinfo32 /nfo C:\report.nfo where C:\report.nfo is the full path of the report file.
- The resulting NFO file can be copied to a different Windows PC or sent to your technician. This NFO file can be opened by double-clicking on it in MSInfo32. You can navigate the system report as if you are looking at your own computer information.
An alternative to creating an NFO file is to create a plain-text report. For that the command would be something like msinfo32 /report C:\report.txt where C:\report.txt is the full path of the report file. This report contains everything about your Windows PC including users, installed software and auto-running applications. You should remove this file if it stays unused by you for more than a month.
What is the difference between the /nfo and /report switches? They both save the system information to a file. However, the /nfo switch creates an XML file with an extension NFO that can later be opened using MSInfo32 on any Windows PC. While the /report switch creates a plain-text file that we can open in Windows Notepad and print off a connected printer.