Alternative methods for the "Finding System Info" page

[err_invalid_name]

I was reading through the Finding System Info page, and noticed some of the simple (ish) ways to find the architecture, board name, and CPU information wasn’t listed.

Opening the “About Version” page

Both the System Architecture and Board Name section use information from this page so I’m putting it in its own section.

Navigate to it directly in Chrome

1. Go to chrome://version/
2. Done!

From the Settings app

1. Open the Settings app

2. Click on the “About ChromeOS” section in the left sidebar.

3. Open the “Additional details” submenu
   

4. Click on the “Build details” item

5. ​ And now you’re there!

System Architecture

This one may actually not be easier than the one in the guide but here for completeness anyways.

1. Open the “About Version” page

2. Look at the “User Agent” row. You should see something like

   Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 14541.0.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
   

3. Look for something like x86_64 in there. In the following example this is the bolded bit right after CrOS.

   Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 14541.0.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

4. And that’s it!

Board Name

Using the “About Version” page

1. Open the “About Version” page

2. Look at the “Customization ID” or the “Firmware Version” row

3. You should see something like the following image
   

4. In this case the board name would be fleex (or Fleex if you want, capitalization doesn’t matter)

5. Voilà!

Diagnostics app

1. Open the Diagnostics app. You can either search for it in the launcher or go to chrome://diagnostics.

2. Look for a little bubble (or a pill shape if you want to call it that) at the top of the page. It should look something like the following.
   

3. The first bit is the board name. Copy that or write it down and that’s it!

CPU Info

1. Open the Diagnostics app. You can either search for it in the launcher or go to chrome://diagnostics.

2. Look for the CPU section, it should look something like the following.
   

   

3. Look at the bubble on the right side of the section heading (that says “CPU”).

4. Copy that and you’re done!

[WeirdTreeThing]

The problem with those methods is they don’t work on older versions of ChromeOS.

[err_invalid_name]

Which methods don’t work on older ChromeOS? What versions do you mean when you say “older ChromeOS”?

I know that the diagnostics app is new but I’m pretty sure that chrome://version has been around for a while now.

Edit: It looks like the Diagnostics app has been around since 2023 and maybe even as long as 2021.

[MrChromebox]

The only thing users need to know is the HWID, anything else just unnecessarily confuses things.

[err_invalid_name]

So why does the Finding System Info page include stuff other than how to find the the board name if it just confuses things?

[WeirdTreeThing]

Good question. It could just go away, along with the firmware stuff that doesn’t reallly belong on the chrultrabook docs.

[MrChromebox]

good question

[err_invalid_name]

If that page is slimmed down, then it would be nice to have another method that doesn’t require you to wipe your device to see the board name.

I guess a few more alternative ways to check what the board name is to either

1. Look up the model name on the Serving Builds page on the Chromium Dash, or

2. Install the Chromebook Recovery Extension and get to the screen that says “On this Chromebook, enter [HWID]”

[WeirdTreeThing]

All you need to do is look on the recovery mode screen

[err_invalid_name]

It’s still nicer if you can check without having to do a shortcut dance.

[WeirdTreeThing]

Method one relies on the user inputting the data correctly, which can’t really be trusted. Model names are also often very similar between devices. There is a reason why we ignore model names completely.
Method two may not work on older devices if the webstore doesn’t work properly on them.

[MrChromebox]

chrome://system, CTRL+f HWID does it

[err_invalid_name]

I was just looking at your docs and was going to mention it but you beat me too it, by several hours . Maybe this could be added to the Chultrabook Docs?