I often find myself crawling under the desk looking for labels or turning around laptops trying to find half-erased and destroyed panels showing computer serial numbers and other cryptic hyeroglyphs.

Let me tell you about serial numbers. These are quite useful to keep handy in case your stuff is stolen. Luckily, for most manufacturers like Dell, IBM, Toshiba and HP, there’s a way to find these without leaving the desk, providing they’re running some sort of Redmond operating system and using WMIC (Windows Management Instrumentation Command). Custom built systems may not have so much useful information, but it’s pretty fun nevertheless to peek inside using WMI.

WMIC is available on Windows XP, Windows 2003 and later versions. To use WMI information on older operating systems, download and install WMI core for Win 9x or WMI core for Win NT 4 from Microsoft’s website.

There are a gazillion values that can be retrieved/changed using WMIC. The availability of WMI information does vary across different versions of Windows and it requires administrator rights to be run.

In Windows 2000, there are around 4000 properties that can be monitored and around 40 that can be configured. Windows XP raises these numbers to 6000 and 140 respectively.

Now, for instance, to retrieve the serial number of a computer, run the following command on a DOS prompt:

wmic bios get serialnumber

Or to retrieve the model name (these can get quite cryptic sometimes)  run the following command

wmic csproduct get name

When WMIC is run for the first time, it may take a little time until all possible properties are inventoried. Subsequent times you run WMIC, it will start immediately.

Got most of this info from http://www.ss64.com/nt/wmic.html

As usual , YMMV and Microsoft’ MSDN full WMI reference may provide some extended reading and reference on the subject.