What ever happened to ‘winmsd’ in Windows Server 2008, Vista and Windows 7?

Something that caught me out recently was trying to bring up system information about my Windows Server 2008 machine.  I have in the past always typed ‘winmsd’ and a box would appear with a pretty decent amount of information on the system from which I ran the command from.

Though trying this old faithful of a command from my Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 (and I believe the same is true for Windows Vista) machines led to nothing happening and no useful system info window opening.  Now this is probably something that I have missed over the last year or so but ‘winmsd’ has now been replaced with a new command called ‘msinfo32’. (Amendment: @wilva has kindly informed me that ‘msinfo32’ has been around since NT4 days – thanks 🙂 ) So if you run this command from either a 32 or 64 bit version of Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 you get the familiar ‘System Information’ screen and details you used to get by running ‘winmsd’.

Maybe I could have run the ‘msinfo32’ command all along (see amendment above) but I thought I’d throw it out there in case there are some fellow ‘winmsd’ die hards out there like myself.  🙂

For more information (credit to @wilva) check out this Wikipedia entry on Microsoft Diagnostics.