PC audits and Network inventory with NEWT Professional

Computers & TechnologyNetworking

  • Author Neyda Tayner
  • Published September 1, 2009
  • Word count 521

As a business grows, there is an increasing need to keep track of a growing number computer systems, as well as a greater difficulty in doing so. In the past, performing inventory on hardware and software throughout a network required actually walking to each machine to write the information down by hand. Fortunately now software products and operating systems have improved to make the process of network inventory much easier. An IT Professional can use the help when it comes to network inventory or PC auditing. NEWT Professional is a tool that has been developed to reduce the strain of asset management. Since its creation in 2003, NEWT has developed into a software product capable of performing high speed PC inventory, scanning 100 computers in less than 5 minutes. This can save money and time for all sizes of organizations. Now that the first 25 nodes are available free, the value is even greater.

There are several methods that can be used by network management products to inventory computers. Two major types are those that use an agent to collect the information from each machine and those that are agent-less. Using an agent-less method can cause scanning to be extremely slow or encounter computer and security configurations that can require the IT professional to need to visit those machines to reconfigure them to work with the Network Inventory software before they can be properly audited. Using our special network inventory techniques, you can bypass these frustrating problems, preventing hours or days of lengthy troubleshooting.

A solid 6 month period was devoted by the programmers of Komodo Labs to develop a solution to these network administration issues. The result is their newest version 2.5. The default configuration of Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7 is to offer read/write access to the ADMIN$ ("admin dollar" or administrator) share, and this access is now NEWT Professional's only requirement needed for scanning. The change offers IT Professionals access to the same information in minutes that previously took hours or even days. In addition to the speed increase, network bandwith usage was greatly reduced. This allows NEWT to minimally impact traffic when performing network inventory over slow connections such as WANs (Wide Area Networks).

Many Managed Service Providers (MSP) and consultants use NEWT Professional to gather information for their clients, and it is useful for providing total network inventory on nearly any network. The software detects all the common hardware and software inventory information, like system serial numbers, CPU info, or software product keys, and also goes more in depth, returning such things as CPU, system, and hard drive temperatures, correct hard drive type (IDE vs. SATA) and serial number, USB type (1.x or 2.0), detailed RAM slot info, monitor type (LCD/CRT), and many others.

The voluminous data gathered through NEWT Professional during a network audit is then viewable in an easy-to-read spreadsheet, and can be saved to NEWT's proprietary format, or exported to HTML, text, Excell, or even a fully relational MS Access (MDB) database.

NEWT Professional is a handy tool to meet the needs of network professionals everywhere, quickly and affordably.

Visit http://www.komodolabs.com for more information.

Neyda Tayner is a technical and promotional writer, specializing in IT software promotion. www.komodolabs.com

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