Retrieve machine GUID?

[ratty]

Guys, I'm really excited to dig into all of these great suggestions this weekend. All of this advice is very, very appreciated.

Taking the registry approach, is the UUID in the same spot for all Windows versions? If not, is there a better solution?

As for the wmic approach, I learned quite a bit from exploring that option. Command line is something I'm woefully undereducated in.

[ratty]

If you don't want your user to elevate administrative rights after they have installed it, then I highly recommend you do the checks post-install by launching an executable that does require elevated rights but because the installer had elevated rights, it won't require your end-user to elevate again thus rendering it already 'administrative' and you can then quickly gather an ID from the registry and write that out to a file what you can use for your app launches.

Additionally, you can use any of the hardware IDs present for uniqueness, all the hardware IDs are stored in the registry. I can't think off the top of my head right now but I know they are there, I used them a few times in various different projects for generating super-unique strings.

You mention using any of the hardware ID's for uniqueness. Is there any reason one is better than the others? I'm assuming UUID is best since it's difficult to spoof and won't be duplicated across many machines in a similar location, such as a computer lab, for example.

[danworth]

The example attached with the wmi extension retrieves the uuid if you wanted to check that out.

[ratty]

The example attached with the wmi extension retrieves the uuid if you wanted to check that out.

Just now had a chance to look at this. Seems perfect!! Thanks for putting it together. Are there any considerations to be had, such as user privileges or anything? Is there a way for this to also return the GUID, since I think the UUID can be changed?

[ratty]

Between Danworth's wmi extension and learning that the Registry2 object needs to be manually updated from the bugbox thread Advaith posted, there are now solutions to retrieve both the UUID and GUID. Very useful stuff people! I'm glad this thread came together.