Is there a live CD distro out there with the sole purpose of booting, telling me everything that the system has (CPU, GPU, motherboard, HDD capacity & Manufacture, etc) and all with out having to think or open a single terminal?
Benchmarking would also be nice.
I'm not familiar with one off the top of my head, but any bootable Linux CD including dmidecode, si, and hwinfo will give you much of that.
There's an old-school script called 'system-info' which also extracts much of this:
Depending on how much detail you want, you can boot the Live CD of most recent Gnome3 systems and get decent hardware info from the system monitor program. But it's fairly high level.
If you want all the nitty gritty about every last ASIC and PCI device and internal devices like the HPET, watchdog timers, unused ports and so on, you're probably going to have to resort to a terminal.
