We only listed two options here and if you know any others, feel free to share them in the comment below. If you want to ID a machine, the old way of using the Mac address is not reliable anymore. It even returns all of the numbers if you have multiple hard drives physically connected to your machine. That’s almost the better approach if UUID fails, meaning that you can rely on the HDD’s serial number. The second option is to use the hard drive’s serial number as a unique identifier. Also keep in mind that if you re-install Windows, this ID might change as well.

For example, on those Windows volume activated or none genuine Windows machines, the Product ID will always be the same. This is the ID you can retrieve easily from Control Panel > System and Security > Systemīut that doesn’t always guarantee the uniqueness of the machine. The first one is to use your Windows product ID. In Windows, there are a couple of alternatives that you can use if UUID idea failed. In that case, when you use wmic trying to retrieve it you will get all FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF as the ID back. Some of the motherboard vendors might not include this UUID in their motherboard, which is quite common on those non-OEM machines. You can run the above wmic command to get it.īut wait, that’s not always the case. It is 32 characters in length, a universally unique identifier. That UUID is the best way to ID a machine, it exists in Windows, Mac and many other platforms.

We covered in the past that you can use the wmic command to find all the system info from your machine. Now what? Use UUID as the Identifier When You Can

With that, the days of using the MAC address as a unique identifier of a computer are gone. Not to mention when it’s running on a virtual machine. Moreover, the MAC address even changes when you are on or off a VPN connection. The MAC address quickly changes every time when your computer connects from a wired network to a wireless network. For example, almost all laptops come with one Ethernet, one Wi-Fi network adapters, and one Bluetooth. Why? Because each computer can easily have multiple MAC addresses from multiple network adapter. The traditional method of leverage the MAC address as the computer’s unique identifier is not going to work anymore. Suffice to say, it’s a lot complicated than what I initially thought. Lately, I ran into an issue, trying to identify the uniqueness of machines across platforms.

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