Windows – Looking for ‘WinHlp32.exe compatible’ replacement for free redistribution under vista and windows 7

For Windows, you could use a quick powershell script to wrap up WMI, something like this:

function Get-Inventory([string] $computer = '.')
{
    $data = ""|select name, vendor, model, serial
    $bios = get-wmiobject 'win32_BIOS' -computername $computer
    $comp = get-wmiobject 'win32_computersystem' -computername $computer
    $data.name = $comp.Name
    $data.vendor = $comp.manufacturer
    $data.model = $comp.Model
    $data.serial = $bios.SerialNumber
    return $data
}

If you feed that a text file listing all your computers, like this:

get-content 'mycomputers.txt' | foreach-object{Get-Inventory}

you will end up with a nice table of computers and hardware details. If you need to archive the data, use the export-csv cmdlet to dump the output straight to a file.

tortoiseSVN is very good.