As scary as it is, there are a few interesting applications for PHP out there that can help the Win32 users in the audience. One such application is the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) allowing you to control almost every aspect of your system.

Using a new kind of query language (WQL - WMI Query Language), you can use the passthru function in PHP to make the request to the server (via WQL) and pass back the results into a PHP variable. Then, all you need to do is parse the results and you're home free. Of course, the author mentions near the end that he would only use WMI if you absolutely needed to - it can be quite dangerous if the power should fall into the wrong hands.

For more information on WMI, check out the Microsoft website to get the scoop.