SMBIOS<\/A>\ndirectly, so it’s as reliable as your BIOS.\nMajor manufacturers will put their names into the BIOS¹,\nbut if you’re running on a home-built machine, the values\nare whatever came with your motherboard.\nThe BIOS manufacturers typically put placeholder strings into\ntheir SMBIOS, setting the manufacturer to a generic string like\n“Manufacturer”, for example.\nWhen the motherboard manufacturer installs the BIOS,\nthey’re supposed to replace the placeholder strings with\nsomething more meaningful, but most of them don’t bother.\nThe result is that a machine you put together from parts\nyou bought at the local computer shop will most likely\njust say “Manufacturer” for the manufacturer.\n<\/P>\n\nIn summary, if you query WMI for the computer manufacturer\nand it comes back “Dell”, then you can be pretty sure you have a Dell.\n(Either that or somebody with way too much time on their hands\nburned a custom BIOS that says “Dell”.)\nOn the other hand, if it comes back as “Manufacturer” then you’re\nstill in the dark.\nAll you know is you’ve got some sort of generic computer.\n<\/P>\n
\n¹Even though major manufacturers will put their name\ninto the BIOS,\nI’m told that if you send your computer back to the manufacturer\nand they replace the motherboard,\nthey will sometimes forget to burn their name into the BIOS of\nthe replacement motherboard.\nAs a result, even on a name-brand computer,\nyou might see “Manufacturer”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One customer wanted a way to determine the name of the computer manufacturer. For example, they wanted to make some function call and get back “IBM” or “Compaq” or “Dell”. I don’t know why they wanted this information, and for the moment, I don’t care. And of course, when you’re looking for information, you don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-19783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-code"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
One customer wanted a way to determine the name of the computer manufacturer. For example, they wanted to make some function call and get back “IBM” or “Compaq” or “Dell”. I don’t know why they wanted this information, and for the moment, I don’t care. And of course, when you’re looking for information, you don’t […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}