How to Check My PC Specs — What a Website Can See

What a browser genuinely knows

This list is short, and everything on it is a real reading rather than an inference.

Screen numbers are the strongest. A page can read the screen in CSS pixels, the pixel density, and the size of its own window, which together give the physical pixel count the panel is being driven at. That is enough to settle most display questions and it is exactly what a support desk asks for first.

Browser identity comes next, with a caveat. The browser reports its own name and version, and modern ones do it twice — once in a structured form and once in a legacy text string that is deliberately misleading. Both are self-reports, so read them as claims.

After that the list thins out. Core count is available but rounded and sometimes capped, so treat it as a floor rather than a spec. Touch support, orientation, language, and whether cookies are enabled are all readable and all reliable. Memory is exposed only as a coarse bucket in some browsers and not at all in others, which makes it useless for the question people actually ask.

What it cannot see, and why that is on purpose

The list of what a browser cannot read is longer, and it is longer by design.

The processor model, the graphics card model, the amount of installed memory, the motherboard, the storage devices and their free space, the battery health, the temperatures: none of these are available to a web page. That is not an oversight waiting to be fixed. Each one is a strong, stable identifier, and a page that could read several at once could recognize the same machine across unrelated sites without any cookie at all.

The browser also cannot see physical dimensions. It knows how many pixels your screen has but not how far apart they are, so screen size in inches and pixels-per-inch are outside its reach no matter how the question is phrased.

There is one partial exception worth knowing about, because it is where the confident-looking sites get their material. A page can ask the graphics system for a rendering string, and on some setups that string contains a card name. It is inconsistent between browsers, increasingly restricted for exactly the privacy reason above, and absent entirely in others — which is why two sites can give you two different answers on the same machine.

How the confident sites do it

When a page states your processor or your device model outright, it is almost always doing one of three things, and none of them is measurement.

The first is table matching. Your browser sends a text string describing itself and the operating system; the site compares it against a list of known devices and prints whatever the list says. This works on popular phones and fails silently on anything not in the table, including most desktops, which get a generic answer that looks specific.

The second is inference from what it can see. Pixel density plus screen size plus platform narrows a phone down to a handful of models, so a confident guess is often right. Often right is not the same as measured, and the failure mode is that you cannot tell which case you are in.

The third is asking you. Some pages present a form or a downloadable helper, at which point the page is no longer reading your machine at all. That is a reasonable thing to offer, but it should be labelled, and a page that quietly mixes guesses with readings is not being straight with you.

Where to look for what the browser cannot read

Every operating system ships a tool that answers the rest, and it is more reliable than any web page because it sits below the wall.

On Windows, the settings app has a system page with the processor and installed memory, and there is a separate built-in system information tool that goes further into motherboard and firmware. The task manager's performance tab shows the graphics card and current use.

On macOS, the About This Mac panel gives the chip, the memory and the model identifier, and a system report button opens a fuller breakdown including storage and graphics.

On Linux, the desktop environment usually has a settings panel with the basics, and the terminal has the rest.

On phones, the settings app has a device information section with the model and often the chipset. Note that phones are the case where web pages guess most confidently and most successfully, which makes it easy to trust the guess. Check the settings app anyway when the answer matters.

When the browser reading is the one you want

There are questions where the web page is not a weaker substitute but the right instrument, and they all share a shape: you want to know what a website sees, not what the box contains.

A site renders wrong at a certain size and you are reporting it. The browser's window size and pixel density are the numbers that matter, and the machine's specifications are irrelevant to the report.

A video or a game in the browser looks softer than expected. The physical pixel count the page is being driven at tells you whether the browser is even being asked for full detail, which is a different question from what the panel can do.

Something works in one browser and not another. The browser's own self-report, taken in both, is the comparison, and the processor model has nothing to do with it.

In all three, a page reading its own environment is measuring exactly the thing in question. That is why these tools exist, and it is also why they should not pretend to be a specification sheet.

What to send when someone asks for your specs

Match the answer to who is asking, because the two audiences want different things.

A website's support desk usually wants the browser side: browser name and version, the raw self-report string, the window size and the pixel density, and the operating system family. All of that is readable from a page and copyable in one action, and it is the layer their bug lives in.

A hardware or game support desk wants the machine side: processor, memory, graphics card, and the operating system version. None of that is readable from a page, so take it from the operating system's own tool and paste it as text.

Send numbers rather than descriptions in both cases. Screen resolution and window size instead of "my screen is big"; the exact browser version instead of the name alone. And if you are not sure which side they want, send both — it costs two extra lines and saves a round trip.