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What is this machine, and what has gone wrong on it?

Drop in a DxDiag report and see driver ages, the crash history Windows already recorded, the memory layout and disk headroom. It is built into Windows, there is nothing to install, and the report itself is never written to disk.

It carries more about your machine than a capture does, so less of it is kept: ten fields, read in memory and the rest thrown away. Your machine's name, the number Windows uses to identify it, the serial numbers, the hardware ids and every file path are refused as the file is read and never reach storage.

No file yet? A DxDiag takes about a minute and needs nothing installed:

  1. Press Windows+R, type dxdiag, and press Enter.
  2. The first time, Windows may ask whether to check that your drivers are digitally signed. Either answer is fine; it does not change the report.
  3. In the window, click the button reading "Save All Information..." and choose where to put the file.

This is the configuration half. It reads what Windows already recorded about this machine: driver ages, crash history, memory and disk. It measures nothing, because a DxDiag contains no measurement.