new posters are rarely posting useful system specs

Seems like way too many new posters have something like "win7 x64" as the totality of their specs. Just wanted to start a discussion on how to improve this.

Brink has posted a tutorial on how to use CyberZeus' tool to make it easy to fill out one's specs automatically if you use IE, and manually otherwise. But so many new posters are just not doing it. My guess is not many people are using IE and people just do not want to go through the effort of the manual method? Or perhaps do we need a more forceful statement at registration to motivate people to fill out their specs? What does everyone think?

IE use here is around 10% and falling.


We've tried all kinds of things over the years and there is no solution, the more info you try to force at registration the lower registration rates go, currently we ask for a lot of info but only a few things are required.

It's a common problem on pretty much every Forum of people not giving enough info on their equipment. A lot of times it's because English is a second or third language for the poster. Sometimes I think some people are ashamed of their Rig when there's no reason for that. I do agree that there should be a minimum amount of Date required before anyone attempts to give help.

Personally I'm finally down from 19 desktops to only 5 now along with My Beloved G780 "Gremlin" and a couple of tablets and the phones. I multi-boot most of the PCs, but My personal "Daily Driver" is Win 8.1 so that's the only thing I posted. :)

Was thinking that we might give posters a second option for specs - 1) normal full system specs that go in your profile if you anticipate being a regular on sevenforums (which is our current mode), and 2) brief/easy/cut-n-paste into your one post method which would give only win7 version, ram, cpu, motherboard, and hard drive. I looked around today for a tool that would produce an abbreviated summary like that, but found nothing. All system spec tools appear to produce 20 or more line items, so not sure that would work.

OvenMaster said:

Perhaps because this is a Windows OS forum, newer users don't realize the need to mention hardware or do not know why or how it interacts with the OS.

Excellent point. Everyone assumes that since their hardware has been working fine for years, surely their issue has nothing to do with hardware.