It can be very annoying to try and find the serial number of your laptop only to realise its on a little sticker somewhere inaccessible, requiring you to hunt for a screwdriver to remove a panel, or forcing you to power down to remove the battery.
If you’ve had your machine for a while its possible the numbers on it have faded or the sticker has partly come off, forcing you to play a vague form of hangman to figure it out.
The serial number isn’t something most people care about, unless the laptop gets stolen or they are trying to check warranty online. Trying to find the serial after you’ve lost your laptop isn’t going to be too successful so its recommended to find it and make a note just in case.
If you do find yourself struggling to get the serial by looking at the sticker this might save you some frustration:
- open up an elevated command prompt
- Type “Wmic bios get serialnumber” and press enter
if the serial is registered in the BIOS it should get displayed on screen. I’ve tested the command successfully on various Lenovo laptops, and both HP and Dell desktops.
If you are on a network you can query the serial of a remote machine using:
- wmic /node:NameOfRemoteMachine bios get serialnumber
If you don’t have the correct permissions to the other machine, or have mistyped the computers name you can expect to see this error:
If you get unlucky and the serial isn’t in the BIOS you’ll get this error and start swearing as you head back to Google to find another method:
Urban Security Research 