Originally Posted by Imkantus

Any Linux Live system (Knoppix [-derivates], and stuff like that) is good way to access the necessary hardware informations; for example "lspci -nn" will give you informations about all PCI related devices like your chipset + the IDs of the components or "cat /proc/cpuinfo" will give you some information about the supported instruction sets of your CPU, so that you might have some closer idea of what kernel you might need to select...

If you do not want to look into this, CPU-z for Windows will at least give you some very basic informations.