What is a good unique PC identifier?

Question

I\'ve been looking at the code in this tutorial, and I found that it uses My.Computer.Name to save settings that shouldn\'t roam between computers. It\'s entire

Answer 1

Here is a way to uniquely identify a computer. Using System.Management to get Win32_BIOS, you can get unique values from your machine's BIOS.

See: Win32_BIOS class, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394077.aspx

using System.Management;

string UniqueMachineId()
{
    StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();

    String query = "SELECT * FROM Win32_BIOS";
    ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(query);
    //  This should only find one
    foreach (ManagementObject item in searcher.Get())
    {
        Object obj = item["Manufacturer"];
        builder.Append(Convert.ToString(obj));
        builder.Append(':');
        obj = item["SerialNumber"];
        builder.Append(Convert.ToString(obj));
    }

return builder.ToString();
}

With similar logic, you can also step through "Win32_DiskDrive"; http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394132.aspx; and get "SerialNumber" for each physical drive. In this case, the

    foreach (ManagementObject item in searcher.Get())

should find multiple items