O&O DeskInfo: display system information on the Windows desktop
O&O DeskInfo is a free application by the German software company O&O Software GMBH. The application displays system information on the desktop when it is run.
O&O DeskInfo has a download size of just 1 Megabyte and installs quickly because of that. The application displays two options on first start, one of which is selected by default. The app warns of unknown USB devices that are connected to the PC it runs on by default, and users may enable the autostart with Windows options.
O&O DeskInfo lists system information in a sidebar that is aligned to the right by default. The information that it displays by default includes the operating system name, version and build, the user and machine name, information about the processor, RAM and system type, CPU and RAM utilization, the IP address, and local drive information. The data is refreshed regularly.
A right-click on the system tray icon of the program displays a number of options. You may switch the display of information to full or minimal. Full adds more information to the listing, including information about the GPU, connection type, IPv6 address, DNS servers and network activity.
Options to align the sidebar display to the left side instead are provided. You may also change the appearance by modifying text and button colors, fonts or the opacity of the sidebar. A click on the label hides the sidebar on the screen, another displays it again.
Other options include changing the interface language from English to German or French, pausing the auto-updating of the data, changing the update frequency from normal to fast or slow, and to enable always on top mode for the interface.
Information can be copied to the Clipboard at any time using the context menu.
Closing Words
O&O DiskInfo is a handy program for some users and maybe also for IT-related activities. Users see important information, such as the username, IP address or operating system version right away. Some may like the display of resource usage, including network usage, that the app provides.
The program ran fine on a Windows 10 version 21H1 installation. O&O makes no mention of system requirements on the application's website. It should run fine on Windows 10 and 11 devices, but it is not clear if it will run on previous versions of Windows as well.
Now You: do you use system information tools?
How does this compare with Microsoft’s Bginfo application? if you run bginfo /taskbar , it will sit in your taskbar and provide system information.
Docs are here if you want to read more about it. – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/bginfo.
I’ve blocked upgrading to Windows 11 using Local Policy Group which creates the following Registry entries.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate]
“TargetReleaseVersion”=dword:00000001
“ProductVersion”=”Windows 10”
“TargetReleaseVersionInfo”=”21H2”
Wow, comments appearing a month before the article posted.
Nice try. Nothing compares with the robustness and beauty of Rainmeter and its multiple addons
and themes, though…
Too many of these utilities around, few of which give useful info, not even the info available in Task Manager, which can be set to stay on top and is much smaller than this. Kinda like driving your car and having the make, model and options displayed instead of speed, fuel level, engine temp, etc.
A simple taskbar widget with CPU and GPU percents and temps would be nice. Maybe memory usage, too.
Stupid. They should just use/port Conky:
https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky
I have been using it for some time and I really liked it because you can adjust the level of information of it.
But with the latest update the level of fading away on the desktop is with brute force adjusted.
Now I cant melt my desktop screen pictures and the program on a way anymore that the background picture is still visible and because of that the O&O desktop info is always on top and main background picture is not visible anymore on the part that the program is visible.
I was hoping for some privacy-friendly alternative to Speccy. Speccy looks very good and shows exactly what I want on the main page – the temperatures in a friendly and easy to see way, but they are owned by Avast so they get a middle finger from me.
All the alternatives I’ve tried out don’t come even close to how user-friendly and straightforward Speccy is. They either show all kinds of useless information and you have to dig through it to get to just the part that you want or you have to spend 5-10 minutes customizing it to get it to look and display to what Speccy does at barely 20% of that.
I call this O&O software useless garbage. The other O&O stuff like AppBuster and ShutUp10++ are top notch on the other hand.
No Portable version?
Why would I use this program which just adds extra running processes and system load when I already have msinfo32, Task Manager and resource monitor built into the O/S?
If I want to look at the info a different way I can look at CPUid and/or HWMonitor, both of which are portable.
I am an IT person of 37 years. This would not be something I would see myself using.
It’s an amazing lightweight portable software and it shows some useful information. However the IP info is not right because it shows the inner ip not the real IP instead. Anyway, it’s a good program. :]
Better not show the gateway IP.
based on screenshot, they lack temperature? and no minimal view. i use wise system monitor in the past, now since becoming linux user, conky is da way, tho its hard to make it as minimal as wsm.