How to check laptop specifications

You’ll want to confirm the specifications of your laptop before purchase, especially if it’s a second-hand unit, and also to confirm whether it’s compatible with a new program or game that you want to run.

While some laptop makers do add stickers with a spec sheet, most don’t. Thankfully, both Windows and macOS include a suite of tools that will let you easily check full laptop specifications and system properties.

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Here’s how to see the properties of your laptop:

DxDiag

This sounds geeky, but the simplest way to get a complete list of laptop specs and properties on Windows is to run a simple command.

Press Win+R, type dxdiag, and hit enter. The app will ask if you want to see if the drivers are signed. You can hit either Yes or No as it doesn’t matter at this stage. This will now open the ‘DirectX Diagnostics Tool’ which will list all key specs of your laptop or PC in the System panel.

Clicking on ‘Display’ will list all GPUs in your machine (integrated and discrete), and the other panels will list all other hardware including sound and input devices, add-on cards, etc.

The one piece of information missing here is storage, which you can find by hitting ‘Save All Information’ and opening the subsequent text file. This file contains a list of all the hardware in your laptop.

On a Mac

On macOS, click on the Apple icon in the menu bar and head to ‘About this Mac’ This will reveal a summary of the hardware installed on your Mac. You can also click on ‘More Info’ for a detailed system overview in case the information you see isn’t enough.

And that’s it! A few clicks and a bit of typing and all the information you want on your machine is available to you. Searching the manufacturers website for specs is always an option, but the above tools are a great way to confirm that you have exactly the hardware you’ve paid for.