One thing that is hard for everyone is documentation. It’s hard to keep CDs, manuals and product keys after you use them. One day you are going to want those types of things and it is always best to have them on hand instead of having to try to recover them.
I was filling out some documentation today at work and wanted to get the Service Tag of the Dell Server and the product keys for the operating system and so on. Well here are a couple of ways you can find these things.
C:\>wmic bios get serialnumber
This command, when entered into the command prompt, will output the Service Tag of your Dell machine.
C:\>wmic /user:[username] /node:[computername] bios get serialnumber
This command will also get the Service Tag of a machine, but can be used when you do not have a remote desktop connection available.
dmidecode -s system-serial-number
And finally, this is the command that you can enter on a Linux box that will give you the Service Tag of the physical box.
When trying to find the serial code for a product such as Windows and Microsoft Office, there is no better program than Magical Jelly Bean. This key finder is small, free and works very well. There is also a premium version that supports more programs as well as a Mac version.
