[Rule] About SlinkyDetect, was: Installation Template

[Marco Fioretti]

David Rigby wrote:

> Slinky Detect detects & reports on CPU, chipset, RAM, hard disk, 
> other IDE-attached devices, and PCI devices. It does not see ISA devices 
> or SCSI-attached and PCMCIA-attached devices, at least not that 
> I have been able to determine. As well its output seems, maybe, to be 
> a bit cryptic for the less technically savvy members of the potential
> audience.

I shall confess that I have never used slinkydetect personally. However,
the main reason why it was born, and its only use case I've heard of so far,
is not to be used once by the PC owner for his/her personal needs.
Slinkydetect is (mainly) for gathering data always formatted in the same way,
to build databases of lots of donated hardware: coordinator hands out one
floppy to volunteers, they all go gathering old PCs, they never
ever look at Slinkydetect output. They're just told: boot every
PC you touch with this floppy, when it's full give it back to me.
Then the coordinator writes, once, some online database that everybody
can read via browser to know if there are X machines left for
school so-and-so.

Said this, your idea is excellent because it does cover the *other*
use cases: single user looking to resurrect his home PC and so on.

> So, that leads to the next proposed article topic, 
> which is an article concerning hardware identification. Besides using 
> Slinky Detect, other techniques (using Windows to identify hardware, 
> web searches, etc.) can be discussed in detail separately.

Ciao,
Marco