Something that caught me out recently was trying to bring up system information about my Windows Server 2008 machine.  I have in the past always typed ‘winmsd’ and a box would appear with a pretty decent amount of information on the system from which I ran the command from.

Though trying this old faithful of a command from my Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 (and I believe the same is true for Windows Vista) machines led to nothing happening and no useful system info window opening.  Now this is probably something that I have missed over the last year or so but ‘winmsd’ has now been replaced with a new command called ‘msinfo32’. (Amendment: @wilva has kindly informed me that ‘msinfo32’ has been around since NT4 days – thanks ) So if you run this command from either a 32 or 64 bit version of Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 you get the familiar ‘System Information’ screen and details you used to get by running ‘winmsd’.

Maybe I could have run the ‘msinfo32’ command all along (see amendment above) but I thought I’d throw it out there in case there are some fellow ‘winmsd’ die hards out there like myself. 

For more information (credit to @wilva) check out this Wikipedia entry on Microsoft Diagnostics.

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