If I were to talk to you right now and ask you to tell me about the processor in your computer, could you give me an answer? What about your cache? The RAM installed? The motherboard? The graphics card? Even the biggest hardware geeks would find it very difficult to answer those questions without a little help.

The CPU-Z utility will give you detailed information to all of those questions and more. You can download it for free. Some of you may struggle to find the correct link on the page to download it. The site is funded by ads all of which have a big green download button and none of which download CPU-Z. In the right column of the site is a heading that says “Download the latest release” and below that you’ll find the link to download the latest installer in English or Chinese.

You there in the back, I see you have raised your hand. Why in the world do you need to know this information you ask? Most of the time, you don’t. Sometimes you’ll run into software that has specific requirements. A perfect example was the release of CorelDRAW X5 in 2010 (also required for CorelDRAW X6). It required specific instruction sets that most any processor in the past few years would contain. To be exact, it needed the SSE2 instruction set.

Look at the dialog box below and near the middle of the dialog box is a box labeled “Instructions” followed by a long list of abbreviations. You’ll note that one of those abbreviations says “SSE2” meaning that my computer has what is needed to run CorelDRAW X5 and X6.

Note that I’ve only shown one tab out of the seven tabs available in CPU-Z. Each of them is loaded with detailed information about the hardware in your system. No need to memorize any of this or even write it down. Just have a copy of CPU-Z installed and you can quickly check anytime someone (or something) asks about the hardware in your computer.