Softpedia >Windows >System >System Info >Basic Hardware Inventory >  Changelog

Basic Hardware Inventory Changelog

What's new in Basic Hardware Inventory 9.02

Apr 9, 2023
  • The Settings and Help screens now show the correct default theme (Black-and-White)

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 9.01 (Mar 30, 2023)

  • Default theme now really changed to Black-and-White
  • Fixed some "non-fatal" coding inconsistencies (replaced objDictionary( "key" ) by objDictionary.Item( "key" ) for consistency's sake)

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 9.00 (Mar 28, 2023)

  • Keyboard and mouse now each have their own row in the main screen
  • Keyboard and mouse info that cannot be read reliably without elevated privileges will be hidden from view when running without elevation
  • Routines to retrieve network adapter, harddisk and sound device information were rewritten
  • Default theme changed to Black-and-White
  • Improved error handling for remote access problems
  • Removed custom window size function (/SIZE switch)
  • The HTA now starts maximized
  • Removed Maximize and Minimize keyboard shortcuts
  • Fixed an issue with zoom factor other than 100% and overlapping memory output fields
  • As a workaround for the Google Chrome issue (see known issues) an unelevated minimized Chrome session is started just before the HTA restarts itself with elevated privileges if Chrome is the default browser and if Chrome is not running yet
  • An informational message will popup if action is required to enable WinSAT scores (see known issues)
  • WMI-related code optimized for better performance
  • As of this version Windows 7 and earlier versions are no longer supported; use version 8.04 (included in download) on these older systems

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 8.04 (Feb 6, 2023)

  • Fixed: routine for 4GB or more video memory would not work if multiple video controllers were installed
  • Fixed: as WMI does not return the correct amount of video RAM for internal video controllers, the HTA will now always try and read the correct amount from the registry for every video controller installed

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 8.03 (Jan 27, 2023)

  • Fixed: virtual video device (e.g. Citrix) would result in empty field above first video device
  • Fixed: routine for 4GB or more video memory would not work on remote computers
  • Fixed: "Details" button for CD-ROM devices would only be enabled if at least 2 CD-ROM drives were available

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 8.02 (Jan 3, 2023)

  • Fixed: very long property names would be truncated in details windows.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 8.00 (Jun 26, 2022)

  • The HTA no longer uses Internet Explorer
  • More debugging messages when /DEBUG switch is used
  • Timestamp format changed in debug output (now contains delimiters)
  • Fixed: sound button remained disabled when running in in WinPE mode

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.11.1 (Feb 4, 2022)

  • Fixed: an error would occur when no floppy drive was connected.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.11 (Feb 4, 2022)

  • Floppy drives have been added as a category in the main window.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.10 (Nov 16, 2021)

  • Use of Internet Explorer is forced regardless of /NOIE setting when running without elevated privileges.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.09 (Nov 14, 2021)

  • Minor change: when you right-click a field, its content is selected. This makes copying the field's content easier. The code to accomplish this is a oncontextmenu="this.select()" event handler for each HTML text input.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.08 (May 10, 2021)

  • Bugfix: the HTA minimizes at startup, and restores the window when the interface is completely loaded, or you would be staring at a blank window for several seconds.
  • However, restoring the windows would fail if the window lost focus.
  • The bugfix in version 7.06 did not always solve this issue.
  • It has now been fixed by adding a line window.focus just before the code to restore the window.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.07 (Mar 10, 2021)

  • Fixed the garbled © character in the title bar
  • Added a warning note in the help screen on using /NOIE switch by non-admin users
  • Added some code to ease the process of creating screenshots for this web page

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.05 (Feb 19, 2021)

  • DWORD and QWORD values from the registry are now shown both in hexadecimal and decimal in details windows

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.04 (Feb 18, 2021)

  • Added a work-around for videRAM exceeding 4 GB (WMI uses UInt32 for Win32_VideoController's AdapterRAM property, which is limited t0xFFFFFFFF, i.e. 4 GB)
  • Fixed a bug in displaying registry data in details windows

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.03 (Jul 19, 2020)

  • New memory speed field in GUI
  • New memory speed column in exported results
  • Fixed a bug where WinSat score fields in exported results remained empty

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.02 (Jul 15, 2020)

  • New memory form factor field in GUI
  • New memory form factor column in exported results

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.01 (Apr 11, 2020)

  • Performance improvement by replacing the external PowerShell script by "native" VBScript code.
  • New setting (command line switch /VIRTUAL) to include virtual disk drives in the inventory.
  • Added an extra test if the HTA is prepared for icon embedding to the batch file.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 7.00 (Apr 11, 2020)

  • New zoom option (command line switch /ZOOM:percentage) to scale the HTA's content.
  • Harddisk interfaces are now queried by on-the-fly PowerShell code, making the results more reliable, though still not 100% error-free.
  • The number of harddisks, CDROM drive, network and video cards and monitors displayed are no longer limited by a fixed number table rows, instead table rows will be added on-the-fly when needed.
  • Because there is no limit for these devices, the saved tab-delimited export files no longer have a fixed number of columns for each device type, i.e. the number of columns will depend on the specific hardware.
  • New dark theme (black background), but no more background gradients
  • The download ZIP file also contains an icon and a batch file to embed the icon in the HTA (can only be used once, and HTA can no longer be edited).

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.16 (Oct 11, 2017)

  • A lot of new code has been added to allow running this HTA in WinPE (10) and safe mode. Note that not "all" information will be available in these "limited" environments, e.g. monitors and video memory may be missing, in case of multiple video cards only one may be listed, the same for audio. Besides, in WinPE no Internet Explorer is available, nor DxDiag or DMIDecode, so you cannot investigate hardware details beyond the main window.
  • The HTA's ID has been changed from "HardwInv" to "Hardware"; a minor detail indeed, but it allows you to run this new version beside an old version of the HTA.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.15 (Apr 14, 2017)

  • Bugfix: fixed "variable is undefined" errors.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.14 (Apr 14, 2017)

  • Implemented a solution to always open Internet Explorere windows (debug and print dialogs and detailed WMI query results) in the foreground.
  • Modified the Win32_CDROM WMI query to exclude CDROM drives with the word "virtual" in their names, to prevent virtual CDROM drives from being listed.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.11 (Feb 14, 2016)

  • Another bug in the window sizing (the program would sometimes ignore screen size settings in the configuration file) has been fixed
  • And yet another bug in the window sizing (the window size would go haywire when dragging or resizing the window) has been fixed
  • Elevated privileges are no longer mandatory, though still recommended to get "all" details; if you start the HTA without elevated privileges, it will prompt you to restart with elevated privileges
  • Because elevated privileges are no longer mandatory, an optional command line switch /NOADMIN was added to allow skipping the test for elevated privileges
  • Keyboard and mouse detection routines were improved to get at least some results without elevated privileges
  • More keyboard shortcuts have been implemented; see the HTA's Help screen for details
  • The new "Edit" button in the Settings screen opens the configuration file in Notepad; when closing it, any changes are immediately applied
  • Debug mode was implemented: some intermediate setting can be displayed in a separate Internet Explorer window
  • Optionally, the Debug window's content can be saved to a log file when the HTA is closed

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.10 (Feb 8, 2016)

  • A bug in the window sizing (the program would look for a setting "maximize" but ignore a "numerical" setting equal to the screen size), reported by Steve Robertson, has been fixed.
  • A bug in the monitors detection (no monitors found in Windows 8.* and 10), also reported by Steve Robertson, has been fixed.
  • The monitors detection has been completely rewritten to fix this bug.
  • Previous versions of this HTA used the raw EDID data (large array of byte numbers), retrieved from the registry, to find the model, serial number and manufacturer; the new version uses WMI instead, and reads the model and manufacturer as plain string values from the registry.
  • Due to the "almost-entirely-WMI" monitor detection, detection will most likely fail in Windows XP or older; if you still use Windows XP, consider not updating this HTA.
  • The details window for monitors has a new added paragraph with relevant registry values.
  • A new optional setting and its command line swich /CHAIN allow character arrays in details windows to be displayed as interpreted text too, e.g.
  • PropertyValue (array) : 83,121,110,99,77,97,115,116,101,114,0,0,0
  • PropertyValue (string): SyncMaster
  • Some BIOS property values have been replaced by SMBIOS BIOS properties in the main window, as these SMBIOS values seem more accurate.
  • When you hover the mouse pointer over a field, the value is shown in a tooltip, so you no longer need to click a field and scroll to the right to read the entire value.
  • Keyboard shortcuts have been implemented for several buttons; see the HTA's Help screen for details.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.09 (Jan 19, 2016)

  • New "theme" settings allow customization of color scheme

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.08 (Nov 13, 2015)

  • A specific error message is displayed if the HTA runs with 32-bit MSHTA.EXE on 64-bit Windows
  • WinSAT Scores fields are no longer displayed in Windows XP or older
  • Credits for DMIDecode for Windows were added

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.07 (Oct 23, 2015)

  • A bug in the NIC Speed detection has been fixed.
  • The WMI query for physical network adapters has been simplified.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.06 (Oct 23, 2015)

  • A bug which made the HTA trip on empty PATH entries has been fixed.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.05 (Oct 23, 2015)

  • A bug which prevented remote inventories has been fixed.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.04 (Oct 23, 2015)

  • Two annoying inconsistencies, both reported by Steve Robertson, were fixed:
  • If no network connection is available, the HTA will no longer suggest to manually check for updates.
  • I changed the default file extension for tab delimited output from ".csv" to ".txt".

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.03 (Oct 23, 2015)

  • A bug was fixed (error in the default path for the configuration file).
  • An issue is fixed to allow stand-alone use (if no network connection was available, the check for updates would crash).

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.02 (Apr 10, 2015)

  • A new optional switch /DMIDECODE uses DMIDecode to add DMI/SMBIOS data to several Details pages.
  • The /SAVE switch no longer asks for a file name if no file name was specified, but uses Hardware.computername.20150410101004.csv in the HTA's parent folder.
  • The /SAVE switch now also accepts file names as parentfolderpath\*, in which case Hardware.computername.20150410101004.csv will be used in the specified folder parentfolderpath.
  • Several quirks and bugs reported by Steve Robertson were fixed.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.01 (Jan 17, 2014)

  • Added BIOS serial number to reports

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 6.00 (Jan 16, 2014)

  • Added mouse and keyboard to the full inventory.
  • New screen to interactively manage settings.
  • Check for administrative privileges.
  • Added 'Fast printing'.
  • Fixed print preview issue.
  • All permanent settings are displayed in their own window when the "Settings" button is clicked.
  • The configuration file can also be edited "manually" in Notepad.
  • The settings can be restored to "factory defaults" by clicking the "Reset" button.
  • The Settings, Help and Credits screens are all opened in the main program window, thus minimizing the chance of stray Internet Explorer leftover sessions after closing the HTA.
  • Pressing the Escape key returns you to the main program window.
  • In the Help and Credits screens, pressing the Backspace key will do the same.
  • CSS code has been added to allow fast printing without the use of an Internet Explorer object (press Ctrl+P to print).
  • Some switches can no longer be used in the configuration file, but are now commandline-only; see the program's Help screen for details.
  • Fixed print preview issue.
  • The HTA checks if it is running with elevated privileges, and displays an error message if not.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.51 (Nov 25, 2013)

  • Added Windows System Assessment Tool's (WinSAT) scores.
  • Improved update check, it now starts in a separate thread to speed up initial
  • window loading.
  • Less dependency on separate Internet Explorer objects.
  • Fixed more incorrect HTML and CSS to anticipate future Internet Explorer versions.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.50 (Dec 21, 2012)

  • HTML and CSS fixed to make the HTA display correctly in Windows 8

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.49 (Jan 14, 2012)

  • Fixed another bug with the Hardware.cfg configuration file: a 0 byte file (or no read access to the file) would still sometimes generate an error message (bug reported by Steve Robertson). As of now, if a 0 byte configuration file is saved, it will be deleted immediately.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.48 (Jan 10, 2012)

  • Fixed another bug with /Print and IE9: the print window must be visible for a couple of seconds to allow IE to send the data to the printer.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.47 (Jan 10, 2012)

  • Fixed a bug with the Hardware.cfg configuration file: a 0 byte file would crash the HTA (bug reported by Steve Robertson).
  • Fixed a bug with Print and IE9: IE9 suddenly refused to show a print preview if the IE object was invisible.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.46 (Jan 5, 2012)

  • Added a "Print" button and /PRINT command line switch.
  • When the "Inventory" button is clicked, all deselected components (rows) will be hidden from view.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.45 (Oct 13, 2011)

  • Added physical monitor dimensions (requires Windows Vista or later).
  • Added the /CM command line switch to display physical monitor dimensions as width x height cm instead of diagonal in inches.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.44 (Sep 26, 2011)

  • If the /DXDIAG command line switch is used on the local computer, DxDiag data will now be displayed, besides WMI data, in most Details windows.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.43 (Sep 19, 2011)

  • Fixed errors occurring when switching between Help and Credits.
  • Fixed missing and incorrect Help and Credits window titles.
  • Fixed Help and Credits windows' focus.
  • Prevented multiple instances of the Help and Credits windows to be opened.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.42 (Sep 19, 2011)

  • Added support for USB harddisks (command line switch /USBSTOR).
  • Added command line switches /DXDIAG, /KeepXML and /XML. These switches allow you to use DxDiag.exe to query DirectX data instead of WMI for video memory and screen resolution. The details window for the video controllers will contain DirectX as well as WMI data if /DXDIAG is used.
  • The DirectX query may take a minute or more, unless the /KeepXML switch is used (then it takes that long only the first time the HTA is run).
  • Added a "Save" button and /SAVE command line switch to save the results in tab delimited format to a file.
  • Moved the help text to an Internet Explorer window, as the amount of text now exceeds the limit for MsgBox dialogs.
  • Added some extra error handling and error messages, to allow debugging.
  • Rearranged some of the buttons.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.41 (Aug 4, 2011)

  • USB field now distinguishes between USB 2.0 (or older) and 3.0.
  • System Slots field now distinguishes between PCI and PCI Express.
  • Improved SATA detection (though still far from perfect).
  • Added Details button for monitors (won't show any useful information in Windows 2000).
  • Inventory now uses a PING before trying to connect to the specified computer, thus significantly decreasing the delay in case the computer is not online or does not exist.
  • Details windows now show namespaces as well as class names.
  • Details windows now show number of instances found for each class.
  • Details windows now correctly display properties of type Array.
  • Fixed some bugs in the interface (focus).

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.40 (Jul 11, 2011)

  • More testing and code optimizing by Steve Robertson and yours truly resulted in the following changes:
  • The HTA is much faster.
  • With the new "Basic" button you can easily toggle between a basic (CPUs, memory and harddisks) and full inventory.
  • Clicking the new "Help" button opens the Command Line Help window, just like pressing F1 does.
  • The credits were moved to a separate screen. Clicking the new "Credits" button opens the Credits window.
  • The delay times between inventories of components have been removed again. The optimized code doesn't leave the HTA unresponsive for a long time, so the delays became obsolete.
  • The /NODELAYS command line switch has been removed too.
  • Only one single delay remains, between pressing the "Go" button and actually starting the inventory; the delay allows the HTA to immediately disable its checkboxes and buttons.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.30 (Jul 5, 2011)

  • Steve Robertson thorougly tested and debugged version 5.21 on Windows XP with Internet Explorer 7, resulting in the following changes:
  • A check for the Internet Explorer has been added, so the HTA now correctly displays multiple harddisks, CDROMs, network or video adapters in IE7 too.
  • The delay times between inventories of components have been corrected (these delays allow the HTA to update its GUI with intermediate results).
  • The new command line switch /NODELAYS will skip those delays (at the risk that impatient users may invalidate the results by clicking because the HTA does not seem to respond).
  • The two rightmost colums became wider, so the minimum required screen width is now 1024 pixels.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.21 (Jun 27, 2011)

  • Two minor bugs in the interface were fixed.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.20 (Jun 20, 2011)

  • Added command line switches /BASIC (select CPU, memory and HDD only), /COMPUTER:name (specify computer to be queried, starts inventory immediately), and /COPY (copy the results to the clipboard and terminate the program).
  • The command HARDWARE.HTA /COMPUTER:MYPC /COPY /NOUPDCHK will copy the inventory results of computer MYPC to the clipboard.
  • The command HARDWARE.HTA /COMPUTER: /BASIC /COPY /NOUPDCHK will copy the very basic inventory results of the local computer to the clipboard.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.10 (Jun 17, 2011)

  • Now differentiates between IDE and SATA interfaces for harddisks and CDROM drives.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 5.00 (Jun 17, 2011)

  • Rewrote the code for multiple instances of components (HDD, CDROM, and video and network adapters).
  • Added on screen help (press F1).
  • Added several command line switches (pressing F1 will list them all).
  • Now displays intermediate results while the inventory is running.
  • Can now handle up to 8 harddisks, and up to 4 CDROMs, video cards and/or networ adapters.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 4.21 (Jan 12, 2011)

  • Bugfix for NIC inventory in XP.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 4.20 (Sep 27, 2010)

  • Corrected listing of multiple monitors and/or network adapters

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 4.10 (Dec 11, 2009)

  • Added monitors to the inventory.

New in Basic Hardware Inventory 4.00 (Dec 11, 2009)

  • Added sound cards to the inventory, plus support for multiple video and network adapters; removed commas from CSV file to enable more reliable import in spreadsheets.