OS Detect

You've probably heard of x86, x64, 32-bit, 64-bit, i386 or AMD64 Windows. This represents the architecture type of your computer and determines its memory limitations. Depending on how much RAM your PC is equipped with, you can decide what to install between 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.

Finding out the architecture type of your operating system is further necessary to decide what type of software applications can run on your computer. For example, many software makers separately develop 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the same applications, which are optimized to work with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, respectively (we here at Softpedia mention this on the download mirrors). When this happens, you simply have to make sure you're getting the matching version.

If you don't want to go through the trouble of exploring various parts of your operating system to learn the type of your OS, you can resort to third-party tools instead, such as OS Detect. It comes wrapped in a tiny package and doesn't require installation.

The only requirement it has is .NET Framework. If you have trouble running it, then you have to turn it on since it's a built-in feature of modern Windows models. It's not necessary to make any clicks to trigger a scanning operation because the operation is performed at startup automatically.

As soon as you launch OS Detect, you can find out the architecture type of your operating system, along with the edition (e.g. Windows 10 Pro, Windows 8.1 Enterprise Evaluation, Windows 7 Professional). No other options are available so you can exit to the screen at this point. Perhaps some users prefer to be able to export all system-related information to file but this is not the case of OS Detect.