Quote Originally Posted by motivatedlad
Mick , where are thou?
Around

From the list of recent questions you have asked it seems like you want to design an application to gather information in a managed environment.

The two common ways of doing this [rather than relying on OS specific APIs] is via SNMP or WMI [CIM:Common Information Model].

COM based WMI [Windows Manangement Instrumentation] is pretty straight forward and provides you with local and remote management apis which will return a large variety of system information.

SNMP [Simple Network Management Protocol] can seem a bit arcahic but it is also fairly straight foward and is standard across platforms.

[windows API]
WMI:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...start_page.asp
SNMP:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...start_page.asp

There are a ton of samples on how to use WMI on msdn and via google/developer articles. Same with SNMP.