Windows only: Planning an upgrade soon? Save yourself the web searches for your specs and download Speccy. Speccy does a quick scan of your machine and gives you a complete rundown of every piece of gear that's in your computer.

Upon first glance, Speccy seems like something that's only attractive to power users, but it can be useful for anyone. When the Device Manager doesn't give you enough information about what kind of RAM you have (say, if you're looking to upgrade), Speccy will give you all the information you could possibly need, including the RAM type, how much you currently have, and even the number of slots used so you can buy with confidence.

You can view your computer's information in a brief summary (as shown), or click on any of the categories for a very, very detailed report. Speccy gives you detailed information for CPU, motherboard, graphics, hard drives, optical drives, and audio, all so you don't have to go searching somewhere else to find out what you have. In addition, it also gives you real-time information on things like bus speed, DRAM Frequency, and temperature, to name a few.

We've featured one or two different tools like this in the past, but thus far, this is the cleanest and most detailed one we've used yet. Speccy is a free download, Windows only.

Windows only: When you upgrade your video card—or even just the drivers—the old version leaves settings and registry entries cluttering up your system—but you can clean them up.

Driver Sweeper works by removing all the extra stuff that the driver uninstaller leaves behind—so you'll need to first uninstall the video card, motherboard, or sound card drivers, and then run the utility to remove all the extra traces. Once you've done so (and rebooted), you can proceed with installing the newer drivers. It's one of those really useful utilities that isn't necessary for most people—in fact, not recommended for the less tech-savvy—but a critical tool that I've used whenever I do an upgrade.

Driver Sweeper is a free download for Windows only. If you have a device that isn't supported, or want to remove drivers the built-in Windows way, I've previously written an article on how to boost performance by removing old drivers after upgrading to new hardware.

Whether you're a first-time computer builder or a seasoned pro, deviantART user Sonic480's computer hardware poster, which helps you identify countless different types of hard drives, RAM, ports, CPU sockets, power connectors, and more, is a great reference.

Chances are you don't know the ins and outs of every single connector or piece of computer hardware you'll come across (even if you do have experience), and while we're sure the poster could cover even more territory (if we're being picky), it's a pretty great visual reference.