BoardScout

A portable app that maps your motherboard, bandwidth, drivers, storage, and operating system in one place: what is plugged in where, what each part is good for, what needs attention, and how long your OS will keep patching it. It never installs drivers or firmware. It runs on Windows, and on Linux in your browser (BoardScout for Linux), and it can open any other Linux or Windows machine you reach with SSH (Machines).

Status: v2.5.1 (2026-10-29) · Windows 10/11 and Linux (x64, arm64, arm, musl) · remote machines over SSH · .NET 10 · MIT license · Download · Changelog

What it's for

For anyone who wants to know what is really inside a PC and whether it is set up well, without opening the case or reading the motherboard manual: someone planning an upgrade, chasing a slow drive or crackling audio, adding a second NVMe drive, or checking how long the OS will keep getting patches. BoardScout shows which slot and port each part sits in, which link speed it actually negotiated, whose lanes feed it, where the power goes, which drivers are out of date (with links to the official download, never installing anything itself), and a plain-language plan for getting the most out of the hardware you already have. It does the same for Linux PCs and for other machines you can reach over SSH.

How to use

1. Get it. Download BoardScout-<version>-win-x64.exe (one file) or the -win-x64.zip (portable folder) from the latest release, or build it with .\Build-Portable.ps1, which writes them to build\. No installer and no .NET install needed.
2. Run BoardScout.exe. The Overview opens with your board drawn slot by slot, four live gauges in the header, and At a glance beside it: anything worth a look, the live power breakdown, and the system's details. Run it as administrator to see the processor's power and sensors that need it.
3. Scan now (top right) takes a local inventory in under a minute; later starts show it instantly. Run it again after you change hardware or firmware.
4. Look around. Hover a part on the Overview for what it is and what it suits; click to pin it. Topology shows CPU lanes versus the chipset uplink, Connections maps every device to the port it uses (search it, open a drive's details, eject a USB drive), and System covers the OS, its support dates and Windows 11 readiness.
5. Check drivers from the Drivers menu when you want the online check; it is separate and can be cancelled.
6. Read the plan. On Connections, click Optimization plan for advice on memory slots, drive placement, lanes, interrupts and power.
7. Share safely. Turn on privacy mode (Ctrl+Shift+P) before taking screenshots or exporting a spec sheet or JSON; see Privacy mode.
8. Other machines: the Machines tab opens Linux or Windows PCs over SSH (docs/remote.md); on Linux, run the Linux build and open it in a browser (docs/linux.md).

Download and run

From the latest release:

File	What it is
BoardScout-2.5.1-win-x64.exe	Standalone. One file with everything inside. Put it in any writable folder and run it.
BoardScout-2.5.1-win-x64.zip	Portable folder. Extract and run BoardScout.exe; keep Assets, Shell, and DriverScout beside it.
BoardScout-2.5.1-SHA256SUMS.txt	Checksums for both.
BoardScout-2.5.1-linux-x64, -linux-arm64, -linux-arm, -linux-musl-x64, -linux-musl-arm64 (and .tar.gz)	Linux edition. See BoardScout for Linux.

To open Linux machines from Windows (or the other way round), put the builds those machines need next to BoardScout.exe, or let the Machines page fetch them from the release when it needs one.

No installer, no admin rights, and no .NET install needed; the .NET 10 runtime is built in. Scans, reports, settings, and the web views' profile live in a Data folder beside the exe. If that folder is read-only, BoardScout uses %LOCALAPPDATA%\BoardScout; set BOARDSCOUT_DATA to choose another folder. The standalone exe unpacks its bundled files to .NET's per-version cache under %TEMP%\.net on first run.

What you get

Overview — the motherboard, drawn like the board itself: the CPU socket and memory slots, the M.2 sockets and PCIe slots top to bottom, the chipset and its SATA ports, colored by whose lanes feed them (blue for the CPU, violet for the chipset) and showing live load, temperatures, and drive and network traffic. The panel beside it starts with At a glance: whether anything is worth a look (and what), notes about the board, the system's details, and how old the parts are. Hover a part for its status, its details, and a plain sentence on what it suits; click to pin it, Esc to go back. Mouse wheel zooms, drag pans. The ASRock B550M Steel Legend has a verified layout: every slot, port, and header under the name printed on the board, empty ones included, with its lane sharing (a drive in M2_2 turns SATA3_5 and SATA3_6 off; M2_3 is Key E for Wi-Fi only). Other boards get the parts Windows or Linux reports. The Windows app and the browser dashboard show the same Overview.

Four live gauges sit in the header (CPU load, memory, temperature, network), beside one chip that says whether the PC is healthy or how many things are worth a look.

Topology — CPU-direct lanes versus devices behind the chipset uplink, with flowing links that move faster on wider buses. Board-specific slot names and lane sharing appear only for the verified board; other boards get generic labels and the slots their firmware reports.

Connections — every device in the PC and exactly where it plugs in, read live from Windows' device tree: the CPU, the chipset and what hangs off it, each USB controller, hub, and port, drives, monitors, Bluetooth devices, network adapters, memory slots, and on out through your router to the Internet. Each card shows the link that device actually negotiated — PCIe generation and lanes, USB speed, HDMI/DisplayPort mode, Ethernet or Wi-Fi rate — and flags links running below what the device supports (a PCIe 4.0 SSD on PCIe 3.0 lanes, an NVMe drive given 2 of its 4 lanes, a USB 3 drive on a USB 2 port) with the likely reason. Dots flow along the real paths as data moves: disk reads and writes, and network traffic from the Internet through the router, the adapter, and the chipset to the CPU. Cards show live speeds — network in Mbps with packets per second, drives in MB/s with IOPS — and details add packets, discards, and errors since the adapter connected. A drive's details add its queue and busy %, the time each read and write takes right now (from Windows' own disk counters: well under a millisecond on an SSD, several milliseconds on a hard drive), the average request size, its fastest read and write since BoardScout opened, and how much it has read and written since BoardScout opened and since Windows started. Click any card for details: link now versus best, live traffic, firmware and driver versions, drive temperature where Windows reports it, IP and DNS settings, and the Wi-Fi network, signal, band, and security. Plug something in and the map redraws itself.

Search (Ctrl+F or /) finds any card by name, kind, or detail — "jpvt", "hdd", a USB ID, a firmware version, "480 Mbps" — lights the matches on the map, and Enter jumps to one (Shift+Enter shows them all). A USB port where something is plugged in but failed to start, drew too much current, or didn't get enough power shows up as its own warning card, even though Device Manager has no entry for it. A device that doesn't appear at all never made a connection: the port saw nothing.

It also puts real names on your network: the router's make and model (read from its own Wi-Fi beacon, even when this PC is wired, or from its web certificate), how many mesh units are in range and which is closest, Windows' name for the network and whether it is Public or Private, and the other devices on it — named where they say who they are and labeled by maker from their MAC address ("CastTV · Vizio", "Ring camera", "Deco BE63 unit · excellent signal"). Find more devices pings every address on your local network so quiet devices show up too. The Internet card can look up your public IP and test your Internet speed (latency, download, upload), each only when you click.

Live drives — also on the Connections tab: every drive animated from its real activity. Hard drives spin faster as data moves, with an arm that seeks at the measured operation rate and parks when idle. SSDs and NVMe drives use FlashStream: light streaks through a tilted grid of NAND dies, blue for reads heading to the PC and amber for writes landing on a die. More streaks means more operations, faster means more MB/s, longer means bigger I/O, and beads circling the controller are queued requests. Click any drive on the map for the same picture in its details. Many USB enclosures don't pass on whether the drive inside spins; then the model number decides when it's a known family (the details say so), and a drive whose type is still unknown gets a plain outline rather than a guess.

External USB drives have an Eject button (click, then Eject now): the same Safely Remove request the taskbar sends. Only when Windows confirms does the card say it's safe to unplug; if a program has a file open, it says so and nothing is stopped.

Optimization plan — on the Connections tab, a plan for getting the most out of what is plugged in, with a Show on the map link on every item:

• USB ports: each controller (the CPU's own or the chipset's), its free USB 3 and USB 2 ports, what hangs off each, and USB 3 devices stuck at USB 2 speed with what limits them.
• USB drives: which run at full speed, which would be faster on a 10 Gbps port or a UAS enclosure, and write caching — Better performance for desk drives, Quick removal for drives you carry.
• Inside the PC: NVMe drives short of lanes and the slot that fixes it, whether the fastest drive has the CPU's own M.2 socket, the graphics card's link, what shares the chipset's uplink, and TRIM.
• Memory: channels, speed against the kit's rating (XMP/DOCP/EXPO), mismatched sticks, free slots, and whether two sticks sit in the slots the board recommends.
• Conflicts and interrupts: problem devices, shared interrupt lines, interrupts and DPCs per processor, and — as administrator — a 10-second trace of interrupt time per driver with each driver's longest run, the thing that makes audio crackle.
• Power: a table of where the power goes, with every number marked as measured (processor package and cores, graphics card, a power supply with a USB link), worked out (the processor's share outside its cores), an estimate (each drive, from an NVMe drive's own power table or typical figures for its kind, scaled by how busy it is), or at most (what USB devices ask for). The motherboard, memory, and fans have no sensor, so they stay "no reading" unless the power supply reports its output. Also: what each USB device asks for, unpowered hubs, and sleeping devices. The Overview's summary shows the same breakdown live.

System — "What your OS says about you": a personality verdict (The Power Developer, The Reliable Holdout, The Battle Station, …), Windows support status from Microsoft's lifecycle pages, patch health, a Windows 11 readiness check on Windows 10, your build, every .NET runtime and SDK, and searchable tables of patches, installed software, and scheduled tasks.

Drivers, Storage, Efficiency — driver versions with links to official vendor, OEM, or Microsoft update pages; every volume with its usage; and suggestions such as enabling XMP/DOCP/EXPO, freeing space, or reviewing BIOS updates.

Version button — the version on a Glimmer orb badge (aurora, the same orb as the browser dashboard's). The orb thinks while a scan, driver check, or download runs, turns mint for a moment when it finishes, and stays red after a failure until the next run or a click. It opens runtime details, sensor troubleshooting, settings (privacy mode, glass effects, motion, live refresh, minimize to tray), dependencies, requirements, and legal notices. Copy diagnostics gathers what an issue report needs.

Which PCs it works on

PC	Works?
Desktop, Windows 10 or 11 (x64)	Yes — the PC it is developed and tested on.
Laptop	Yes. The firmware's chassis type tells BoardScout it is a laptop; the plan adds battery state, and memory advice skips slot placement it can't know for laptop boards.
Windows Server 2016 or later, with Desktop Experience	Yes, with the WebView2 Runtime installed (Topology, Connections, and System need it). Wi-Fi details stay empty without the Wireless LAN service; memory advice skips slot placement, since server boards fill slots differently.
Server Core	No window, but its dashboard opens from another PC over SSH (Machines), or with BoardScout.exe --serve in a browser. Not tried on Server Core.
Linux on x64 (desktop or headless server)	Yes, with the Linux edition, in your browser. Tested on Ubuntu 26.04 (Dell OptiPlex 3050, headless, reached over SSH). Any current glibc distribution should run it; others are untested.
Linux on Arm64 (Raspberry Pi 4/5 with a 64-bit OS)	Built (linux-arm64); untested on hardware.
Linux on 32-bit ARMv7 (Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit)	Built (linux-arm); untested on hardware. ARMv6 boards (Pi 1, Zero) can't run .NET.
Alpine and other musl distributions	Built (linux-musl-x64, linux-musl-arm64), with Alpine's packages and updates; untested on Alpine.
Another PC or server you reach with SSH	Yes: the Machines tab opens its dashboard or checks it, Linux or Windows (Machines).
Virtual machine	Runs, but shows the hypervisor's virtual devices rather than real hardware.
Windows 11 on Arm	Should run the x64 build under Windows' emulation; untested. Windows 10 on Arm can't run x64 apps.
32-bit Windows	No.

Nothing needs admin rights except reading some sensors (see below) and the per-driver interrupt measurement.

Sensors: why a temperature can be missing

BoardScout reads live sensors through LibreHardwareMonitorLib 0.9.6. That library reads CPU, VRM, and motherboard fan sensors through the PawnIO driver (by namazso, https://pawnio.eu/), which it does not ship, and those reads need administrator rights. Without both, only GPU temperature and GPU fans are readable; the temperature gauge's tooltip and the Overview's fan headers ("No reading") say what is missing. The version pop-out shows the current state, links to PawnIO, and can restart BoardScout as administrator. Everything else in BoardScout works without either. The graphics card's power draw is readable without them; the CPU's needs both. Power supplies with a USB link (Corsair HXi/RMi/AXi, MSI) report their output and rails through the same library. NVMe drives' power tables are read without administrator rights.

What goes online

Only these, and only when you ask:

• Check drivers and Download drivers contact vendor, OEM, and Microsoft catalog sources.
• Look up my public IP on the Connections tab's Internet card sends one HTTPS request to Cloudflare (https://1.1.1.1/cdn-cgi/trace), which answers with the address your network uses on the Internet. BoardScout never makes this request on its own, and the Scan Log records each time it does.
• Test my Internet speed on the same card downloads and uploads test data from Cloudflare's public speed test (speed.cloudflare.com) for a few seconds — at most 400 MB down and 150 MB up, which only very fast connections reach — and the Scan Log records it.
• Links you click (official update pages, PawnIO, Report issue) open in your browser.
• Machines connects with SSH to the machines you open or check, and copies BoardScout there. If a machine needs a build this computer doesn't have, Get downloads it from this version's GitHub release (checked against the release's SHA256SUMS), only when you click it.

Everything else is local, including the optimization plan and its interrupt measurement (a Windows kernel trace kept in memory for 10 seconds). Scans use built-in Windows tools, and the Topology, Connections, and System views load their scripts (QuickLiquid, D3) from the app folder, not a CDN. To draw and name your network, the Connections tab stays on your local network: it pings your router, reads the Wi-Fi card's scan list (starting a scan if it is stale), opens a TLS handshake with your router's web interface to read its certificate (it never logs in), asks devices for their names with the usual local protocols (multicast DNS, NetBIOS, UPnP), asks your own DNS servers for reverse names, and labels makers from the IEEE registry bundled with the app. Find more devices pings every address on your local network, only when you click it. "Internet access" on that tab is what Windows' own connectivity check already concluded.

Data safety: what BoardScout does to your drives

BoardScout only reads, and only what Windows already knows. The one exception is Eject, and only when you click it twice: it asks Windows to stop that USB drive, exactly as Safely Remove Hardware does (Windows writes out anything cached first, and refuses while a file is open).

• Your files are never opened. It never opens a volume, folder, or file outside its own Data folder, and never formats, repairs, defragments, TRIMs, or sends SMART commands to a drive.
• Drives are opened with no access rights, which can't read or write data, to ask Windows for the model, size, bus, whether it is an SSD, and the read and write counters Windows keeps (the ones Task Manager shows). Temperature is asked only of internal drives.
• USB hubs say which device is on which port and at what speed, from what the hub driver already knows; nothing is sent to the devices for that.
• One question reaches a USB device itself: its 9-byte configuration descriptor, which says how much power it needs, once per session. Phones and cameras are never asked, so BoardScout stays off the link they copy files over, and a drive is asked only while Windows' counters show it idle, never in the middle of a copy.
• Its own writes go only to its Data folder: scans, reports, settings, and the web views' profile.
• The interrupt measurement (administrator) is a kernel trace kept in memory; nothing is saved.

Copying from a phone? Windows doesn't double-check files copied over MTP. For big copies, plug the phone straight into the PC with a good cable, and keep the originals on the phone until the copies open.

Privacy mode: screenshots and exports you can share

A scan knows things about your PC that a hardware report doesn't need: the PC name, the Windows registered owner (often an email address), the Windows product ID, and motherboard, drive, and memory serial numbers. Scans keep them on disk, and privacy mode keeps them out of what you share.

Turn it on under the version button → Settings, or press Ctrl+Shift+P. While it is on:

• A purple Privacy on chip appears in the header, so a screenshot shows it was taken masked. Click it to turn privacy mode off.
• The System tab hides the installed-software, patch, and scheduled-task lists (counts stay).
• The Scan Log shows THIS-PC and %USERPROFILE% instead of your PC name and user folder.
• Storage shows Volume D: instead of volume labels you named yourself.
• Spec sheet and JSON exports leave out the PC name, machine ID, serial numbers, system UUID, and volume labels. JSON exports stay importable.
• Connections hides MAC addresses, Wi-Fi network names and access-point addresses, IPv6 addresses, the names devices on your network give themselves (they show by type and maker, like "Vizio TV or streamer"), the router's own name for itself, Bluetooth device names that look like someone's ("Sam's AirPods"), the public IP, and the speed test's server location.

Two protections apply even with privacy mode off: JSON exports never include the Windows owner or product ID, and Copy diagnostics always masks your PC name, user folder, serials, emails, and MAC addresses.

How BoardScout keeps work cheap

1. Startup shows the latest cached scan immediately.
2. Scan now is a local inventory (about 10 s). Run it after hardware or firmware changes.
3. Check drivers is a separate, cancellable online step.
4. Live telemetry (CPU, memory, sensors, network) runs on a background thread at the refresh rate you choose (0.5, 1, 2, or 5 s), so the window never waits on hardware. Per-disk and per-adapter rates are sampled only while the Connections map or the Overview is on screen.
5. The Connections map isn't polled: Windows announces device and network changes, and the map is read about 0.4 s after the first one (a read takes about 0.1–0.3 s) and once more after changes stop for 2 s. USB devices are asked for their power needs once per session. The optimization plan is built only when you open it.
6. Web views on tabs you are not looking at, or while the window is minimized, are paused.
7. BoardScout presents updates for review and never installs or flashes anything.

Troubleshooting

• Version button → Copy diagnostics puts version, runtime, Windows build, WebView2, sensor state, and settings on the clipboard for an issue report.
• Unexpected errors are written to crash.log in the data folder.
• BoardScout.exe --system-json prints the System tab's data; --connections-json prints the Connections map with network names (add --privacy to mask it as privacy mode does, --sweep to search the network like Find more devices); --plan-json prints the optimization plan (add --profile, as administrator, for the per-driver interrupt measurement); --scan runs a headless scan; --check-drivers also checks drivers.
• BoardScout.exe --serve serves this PC's dashboard to a browser without the window (add --listen 0.0.0.0 for your network, --port N, --no-browser). --machines, --check NAME|all, and --connect NAME work the Machines tab from a terminal; see docs/remote.md. --summary-json prints this PC's one-line health summary, and --data DIR uses another data folder.
• Topology, Connections, and System need the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime (built into Windows 11 and current Windows 10). Without it those views say so; the rest works.
• A drive with no temperature on Connections is normal: without administrator rights, Windows reports temperature only for some drives (usually NVMe).

Machines: other PCs and servers over SSH

The Machines tab lists every Host in your ~/.ssh/config plus machines you add. Open dashboard signs in with your SSH keys, copies this version of BoardScout into a folder on the machine, starts it there serving only that machine, and shows its dashboard through the same SSH connection: the board, Topology, Connections with live traffic, the plan, Drivers, Storage, and System, for Linux and Windows machines alike. Closing it ends the connection and BoardScout stops there. Check all runs each machine once and puts support status, updates, failed security checks, slow links, full disks, and the top fixes side by side. Keys only, never passwords; host keys are shown for you to compare before they are trusted. Details: docs/remote.md.

BoardScout for Linux

The Linux edition reads the kernel's own files (/sys, /proc) and serves the same views to your browser: the board, Topology, Connections with live traffic, Live drives, search, and the Optimization plan, Drivers with fwupd firmware checks, Storage, Efficiency, and System with your distribution's support dates and a security check, and the same power table. Nothing needs root (with sudo, the power table adds the processor's energy counters and NVMe power tables). boardscout --listen 0.0.0.0 serves a headless server's dashboard on your network. The full guide, including what each optional tool (iw, NetworkManager, BlueZ, udisks, fwupd) adds, is in docs/linux.md.

Build from source

Requires the .NET 10 SDK on Windows (both editions; the Linux edition also builds on Linux).

.\Build-Portable.ps1 -Runtime win-x64

This produces build\BoardScout-<version>-win-x64.zip (portable folder), build\BoardScout-<version>-win-x64.exe (standalone), and a SHA-256 checksum file. The version comes from src\BoardScout.App\BoardScout.App.csproj. BoardScout.cmd builds on first use and then launches the portable build.

dotnet test tests\BoardScout.Tests

runs the unit tests (drive type from model numbers, eject result messages, and the Machines page's probing, quoting, parsing, and SSH error handling).

.\Build-Linux.ps1

builds the Linux edition for linux-x64, linux-arm64, linux-arm, linux-musl-x64, and linux-musl-arm64 (build\BoardScout-<version>-linux-* plus .tar.gz and checksums) after running tests\BoardScout.Linux.Tests.

Source layout:

• src\BoardScout.App — the .NET 10 Windows Forms application
• src\BoardScout.App\UI — the window: header gauges, navigation rail, glass controls, version pop-out
• src\BoardScout.App\Services — scanning, driver checks, telemetry, System tab data, the device tree, network probe, Connections map, firmware (SMBIOS) memory reader, interrupt sampling and tracing, and the optimization plan
• src\BoardScout.App\Assets — Overview, Topology, Connections, System, and Machines web views, plus vendor\ (QuickLiquid, D3)
• src\BoardScout.App\Shell — the browser dashboard (both editions serve it)
• src\BoardScout.App\Web — its server and engine: Hub.cs is shared, Hub.Windows.cs and WindowsOverview.cs are the Windows half (the app's Overview, agent and --serve modes), and BoardProfiles.cs holds the boards known slot by slot (shared)
• src\BoardScout.App\Remote — the Machines page: SSH, probing, copying, tunnels, summaries (shared)
• src\BoardScout.App\DriverScout — the bundled PowerShell scan engine and its notices
• src\BoardScout.Linux — the Linux edition: Platform reads /sys and /proc, Views builds the same payloads the web views use, and Live (with Hub.Linux.cs) streams telemetry. It compiles the Windows app's shared models, web server, Remote code, and network code (*.Windows.cs files stay Windows-only).

License and legal

MIT — see LICENSE. Bundled components keep their own licenses: see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md, which also lists trademark attributions.

BoardScout reads hardware identifiers that Windows and firmware report, for diagnostic and informational purposes only. No proprietary firmware, drivers, or copyrighted vendor materials are bundled or distributed. Windows lifecycle dates reflect Microsoft's published pages as of 2026-09-26 and can change; the Windows 11 readiness result is BoardScout's quick check, and Microsoft's PC Health Check app has the final word. Upgrade prices in the Pimp My Build report are rough estimates, not offers. All product names and brands belong to their respective owners, and their use does not imply affiliation or endorsement.