Not provided in the FCL (.NET Framework Class Library), no. There are many third-party controls out there that do this, however, like .NET Magic Controls[^]. Microsoft MVP, Visual C# My Articles

There are two ways: Use Interop Services and Windows API to do this, see Networking and Directory Services, plus a slew of other native OS functions... Or the easy way...query the WMI...System.Management Namespace, specifically the SelectQuery Class. A good reference for can be found here. With WMI, you query and do all kinds of things which are beyond the scope of this answer...just a taste of some of the things you can query: Computer System Hardware Classes Operating System Classes (You'll be real interested in this one for what you're looking for.) Good luck! Ian Mariano - http://www.ian-space.com/ "We are all wave equations in the information matrix of the universe" - me

lock + begininvoke works great now, thanks a lot! unbelivable that the solution is so easy... :-D

First, you should consider using DataGridTableStyle(s) to control exactly what the user sees (for instance, if you have a PK in your strongly-typed DataSet as a numeric type, users probably don't need to see that). This will allow you to add columns that aren't bound to the DataSet as well. You can use expressions in your DataSet and these are not limited to boolean expressions. For more information and examples, see the documentation for the DataColumn.Expression property at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfSystemDataDataColumnClassExpressionTopic.asp[^]. Why I mentioned DataGridTableStyle before is that you could also extend DataGridColumnStyle and make your own class if you need expressions that are supported by DataColumn.Expression. See the documentation for DataGridColumnStyle in the MSDN library at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfSystemWindowsFormsDataGridColumnStyleClassTopic.asp[^]. Microsoft MVP, Visual C# My Articles