Sorry for my ignorance, but could you please clarify what you mean by "inventory data"? Do you mean listing the software and hardware being used in the machine? If so, have you tried Spiceworks? It is free program that might do what you want.

You have the right idea about inventory data. Mostly I'm just interested in the hardware part. Spiceworks, as I understand it, requires a central server to send data to and it isn't worth the added complication. I just want to run the script once and have some basic info about processor, ram, make, model, drive space, etc. I don't want another system to maintain, have fail, have to update and all that. It just isn't worth the hassle in this case and the data really isn't going to change much when it comes to hardware.

Also, I don't need to run a help desk, connect with others or any of the other multitude of things spiceworks does. It fails the KISS test.

Fair enough. What type of OS is running on the system you want the data about?

Primarily Win XP and Vista. I suppose each OS would have a different script.

In thinking this out more fully, I could setup the spreadsheet to accept input from a webform and then create the script to simply submit the form as an HTTP action. I haven't looked, but maybe they even have an API that'd assist in this. I'd expect a script so I could set the spreadsheet to dump it in a variable at the top. That way, if needed, I could email it to people and ask them to run it. Their interaction would consist of pressing OK at a screen that says, "Successfully Completed" or something like that.

I've also just realized another interesting potential for my purpose. I have bomgar setup in this environment. Bomgar is a remote support tool. I could pull the system info report on each support request and then write something that would take this information that saves in a txt file and import it into a spreadsheet somehow. That would be less universally useful though.

There is a "System Information" tool in Vista (and as far as I can remember it is in XP too, but I'm on Vista at the moment, so can't confirm that). It is at "%SystemRoot%\system32\msinfo32.exe".
If you open that, and go "File"->"Save", you can output all the system information it knows about as an "nfo" file, which is XML. Given the output is XML, you should probably be able to get it in to a spreadsheet format.
I know it isn't script based, but it is a start. Does that help?

Yeah, that's some great stuff. Thanks!

Hello,

I have been using Spiceworks, its great and has all kinds of advantages in terms of I can see if an important server or something has gone offline, its definitely worth trying, I am having some problems auditing our network but this is due to some weirdness with IP address and DNS not consistant. If you have used an old version of Spiceworks its worth remembering the newer versions are much improved.

A good way to analyse the specs of your PC (ie: find out the motherboard of the PC without taking the side off) or figuring out what type of RAM is needed and all other things I recommend a program called CPUZ, there is a portable version of this you can run off your network or off a USB drive, so you can RDP or VNC a PC in another part of your building and run this and get information quickly. I cant remember if there is a way to save the results as a text file or not though.

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html