For this week’s FreewareFrenzy, I thought I would take a look at an information and benchmarking utility called Sandra Lite 2005SR3. If you ever wonder what is under the hood of yours or another computer and what it is capable of, you need a program that will give you that information quickly and easily. So let’s see if Sandra is up to the task.

Installation
Normally I don’t spend time on installation, simply because installation of most freeware is simple and quick. But Sandra’s installation was longer and more thorough then most and I thought it was the mark of a well-made product. Configuring options during installation instead of afterward shows that the programmers want you to have a good experience with their product. First you agree to Sandra’s license, and then read some information on the products capabilities and supported Operating Systems. Sandra will auto detect your OS to install either a 32 or 64bit version. You can setup Sandra for a single computer as I did or for a whole network. Then, you choose a location, selected components, and in my case, check “Do not create Start Menu folder”. Finally, you choose desktop and/or Quick Launch Icons and even allow Sandra through Windows Firewall.

First Glance
After installation I booted up Sandra and found an interesting message. You’ll quickly notice that Sandra is maintained by a British company from the update message: “Your version is rather old, click here for updates”. You can also turn off those meddling Tips of the Day. As you glance around Sandra’s main window you find dozens of Modules, each one for separate tasks or information. The categories you’ll see are: Wizards, Information, Benchmarking, Testing, Listing and Special modules. Along the top of the window you can access various reporting wizards, add and remove modules, edit the view and find Help. The Tools menu connects you to various windows apps such as Disk Defragmenter, Windows Backup, System Monitor and even Notepad.

Reporting
Because the majority of users will probably download this program for system information, I first looked into the Report Wizard. The Wizard is nine steps, so you can easily include all the information you need by choosing modules from each category to customize your report. I chose all the Information modules as well as a CPU Benchmark. But I could have included network information, application lists, event logs etc. Once your report is ready, you name your report, choose where to save it and hit Finish. My report took about 4 minutes to generate an incredibly large, 5.6MB! text file. You are probably better off using individual modules for specific information, instead of a massive, comprehensive report. So let’s look more at the modules.

Modules
As I looked at the modules, I was most interested in the benchmarking. Because I built my computer the Information modules really just tell me what I already know. So I wondered how my system stacks up against others. I first fired up the CPU Arithmetic Benchmark. This module runs a Dhrystone and Whetstone test on your CPU and reports the chip’s MIPS and MFLOPS. These stand for “million instructions per second” and “floating-point operations per second” respectively. I compared my Athlon 64 3200+ to my previous two chips and two upgrade possibilities. Sandra includes information on your chip such as Front Side Bus and cache. It even includes a notice: “Synthetic Benchmark - May not tally with real life” I also fired up the Memory Benchmark to test my 1GB Mushkin DDR RAM. Sandra not only told me what my average bandwidth was, but what I should be seeing.

I found that the Testing Modules are not functional in the free version of Sandra, so you’ll have to look elsewhere for test programs. But indeed, those are not difficult to find. I also opened the Help file to find it is merely links to their website. However, the links would not open through the Help file. I had to manually open up IE and look. The help is there though, should you need it. 

So there you have it. SiSoftware’s Sandra is a very handy information/benchmarking utility. If you are curious about your machine and what it is capable of, take a look at: http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/index.html?dir=dload&location=sware_dl_3264&langx=en&a=