JAVASCRIPT

How to Use JavaScript to Find Hardware Information

This article mainly concentrates on retrieving the hardware information of a system. All of the examples in this article can be directly tested, by simply copying and pasting the entire code (of each section) in any text file with the extension .HTM and opening the file using Microsoft Internet Explorer (preferably 5.5+).

Author Info:

By: Jagadish Chaterjee

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April 11, 2006

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
      <head>
            <title></title>
            <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
7.1">
            <meta name="vs_targetSchema"
content="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5">
      <script id=clientEventHandlersJS language=javascript>
<!--

function Button1_onclick() {
      var locator = new ActiveXObject ("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator");
      var service = locator.ConnectServer(".");
      var properties = service.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM
Win32_OnBoardDevice");
      var e = new Enumerator (properties);
      document.write("<table border=1>");
      for (;!e.atEnd();e.moveNext ())
      {
            var p = e.item ();
            document.write("<tr>");
            document.write("<td>" + p.Description + "</td>");
            document.write("<td>" + p.DeviceType + "</td>");
            document.write("<td>" + p.Enabled + "</td>");
            document.write("<td>" + p.Tag + "</td>");
            document.write("</tr>");
      }
      document.write("</table>");
}

//-->
</script>
</head>
      <body>
            <INPUT id="Button1" type="button" value="Button"
name="Button1" language=javascript onclick="return Button1_onclick()">
      </body>
</html>

The above code would automatically list all the devices (which are part of hardware) along with their descriptions, device types and other information. To retrieve device information, I used the built-in class “Win32_OnBoardDevice.” The class internally has a lot of properties, methods and events. But, in the above example we concentrated only on the properties “Description,” “DeviceType,” “Enabled” and “Tag” (related to “Win32_OnBoardDevice” class).

In general, there will be many types of devices “OnBoard.” The devices include Video, SCSI controller, Ethernet (especially for LAN), and so on. The “DeviceType” property explains the type of device being represented. The following is the table extracted from MSDN to provide you with an explanation of those values returned by “DeviceType.”

Value	Meaning
1	Other
2	Unknown
3	Video
4	SCSI Controller
5	Ethernet
6	Token Ring
7	Sound

The “for” loop I used in the above code iterates for every device present in the system and finally retrieves only the properties of that device. Please be aware that your system may become unresponsive when using this script as it will take a while to retrieve all of the hardware information.

Next: How to list all the information related to processors using JavaScript >>