How To Check Uuid In Windows

Lately, I ran into an effect, trying to identify the uniqueness of machines beyond platforms. Suffice to say, it'due south a lot complicated than what I initially thought.

The traditional method of leverage the MAC address as the figurer'due south unique identifier is not going to work anymore. Why? Because each computer tin easily have multiple MAC addresses from multiple network adapter. For example, almost all laptops come with one Ethernet, i Wi-Fi network adapters, and i Bluetooth. The MAC address chop-chop changes every time when your computer connects from a wired network to a wireless network. Moreover, the MAC accost even changes when you are on or off a VPN connection. Not to mention when it's running on a virtual auto. With that, the days of using the MAC address as a unique identifier of a computer are gone.

Now what?

Use UUID every bit the Identifier When Yous Tin can

Nosotros covered in the past that you can use the wmic command to find all the arrangement info from your machine. And nosotros tin employ the same too here.

wmic csproduct get UUID

That UUID is the best way to ID a machine, it exists in Windows, Mac and many other platforms. It is 32 characters in length, a universally unique identifier. Yous tin can run the above wmic control to get it.

Simply await, that'due south not e'er the instance. Some of the motherboard vendors might non include this UUID in their motherboard, which is quite common on those non-OEM machines. In that case, when you use wmic trying to recollect it you lot will get all FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF as the ID dorsum.

The Alternative

In Windows, there are a couple of alternatives that you can use if UUID idea failed.

The beginning i is to use your Windows product ID. This is the ID you tin can retrieve easily from Command Panel > Arrangement and Security > System

Only that doesn't always guarantee the uniqueness of the car. For example, on those  Windows volume activated or none genuine Windows machines, the Product ID will e'er be the same. As well keep in mind that if you re-install Windows, this ID might modify equally well.

The 2d option is to utilize the hard bulldoze'south serial number equally a unique identifier. That'south almost the meliorate approach if UUID fails, meaning that you lot can rely on the HDD's serial number.

wmic DISKDRIVE get SerialNumber

The higher up command will do the trick. It even returns all of the numbers if you have multiple difficult drives physically continued to your machine.

Conclusion

If yous desire to ID a auto, the erstwhile fashion of using the Mac address is not reliable anymore. In that location are better ways around. We only listed 2 options here and if you know any others, feel gratis to share them in the annotate below.

/Update on July 17, 2015/

There is really another fashion to uniquely identify each Windows PC. Open up upwards Registry and navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Cryptography

Find the key called "MachineGuid" this key is generated uniquely during the installation of Windows and information technology won't change regardless of whatever hardware bandy (apart from replacing the boot-able hard drive where the OS are installed on). That means if you want to continue tracking installation per OS this is another alternative. It won't change unless you do a fresh reinstall of Windows.

/update on Jan nine, 2019/

You tin can run the following cmdlet in PowerShell console to get the UUID besides.

(Go-CimInstance -Form Win32_ComputerSystemProduct).UUID

/update on Sept. 15, 2020/

Windows 10 system tin also be identified past a and then-chosen 4K-Hash, a special hash string that is 4000 bytes in size. It is merely one slice of information required to register Windows machines yet it may be interesting past itself to uniquely identify Windows operating systems for other purposes, besides.

To place, run the following command in an elevated PowerShell window:

(Get-CimInstance -Namespace root/cimv2/mdm/dmmap -Grade MDM_DevDetail_Ext01 -Filter "InstanceID='Ext' AND ParentID='./DevDetail'").DeviceHardwareData

Source: https://www.nextofwindows.com/the-best-way-to-uniquely-identify-a-windows-machine

Posted by: robinsonmuld1978.blogspot.com

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