You asked:
For a way to identify a Windows machine -- the physical machine.
You didn't tell us why, but the question is asked frequently by two groups
of people. Those from the Corporate/Support group. Or the smallware vendor
selling a program or "digital something or other" using try before you buy
of some flavor.
Tom and Fargo have offered suggestions. Fortunately, the black art of what
MS does for XP has been published since 2001 on technet.
The deep dark black arts of MS and their evil plan ... oh, well here it is:
"from MS""""
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/evaluate/xpactiv.mspx
In order to help customers and partners better understand the technologies
used by product activation, and their unobtrusive and anonymous nature, we
will outline in this bulletin:
How the hardware hash component of the installation ID is created and the
scenarios in which a copy of Windows XP may have to be re-activated due to a
substantial hardware modification.
"end MS""""
My question: Can anyone suggest a way or have a code snippet to obtain a
(relatively) unique identification of a Windows machine? I have tried
wading through msdn stuff but it is way over my head.
I am looking for some information that will remain relatively consistent
and apply to the physical computer. One suggestion was to look at several
environment variables and match at least two of them to those of the
originally licensed machine.
My problem is that I could not find a list of the env variable names - and
have never applied declares - and don't have any idea of the returned data
structure. (Although, I believe I can master declares after obtaining
Charles' book.)
Does the RB system.environment class access Windows machines? Would this
be a good place to start?
ANS (YES system ... works on Windows. So say Aaron. And as soon as one of
the volunteers, err, customers reports the problem in documentation it may
or may not be ... ):
http://forums.realsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?t=10413&highlight=system+environment
Continuing, I could suggest that you ask this Q on the Windows Forum of RS.
This is where Aaron and his acolytes struggle with such issues.
But, struggling to maintain civility, getting info from the registry is easy
-- and probably is in Aarons WFS here:
http://www.aaronballman.com/programming/REALbasic/Win32FunctionalitySuite.php
Sorry, I've got to stop writing now. However, to give you hope. It can, it
is done for the Support need. The DRM need is also done. Usually by tagging
the machine holding the content.
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