In my work roll I’m having to manage more and more machines, particularly with the increasing adoption of Virtualisation.  A friend of mine introduced me to a rather helpful little tool which used to be provided freely by SysInternals and now Microsoft (they acquired sysInternals) called BgInfo. BigInfo create a simple wallpaper that provides clear visibility of a machine’s configuration.  Below is an example in Vista:

The only shame is that it doesn’t capture the information for Linux based machines as well.