Battery serial numbers

[Grayda]

In my latest VB.NET app, I've written some code that grabs various laptop / UPS battery information from WMI. The idea is to let IT people see a battery's health and voltage and such. But in running this app on several of our Dell laptops, I've come across some interesting numbers.

First off, the VB.NET code that grabs the battery info is:

        Dim results As String = ""
        Dim batteryReturn As Management.ManagementObjectCollection
        Dim batterySearch As Management.ManagementObjectSearcher
        batterySearch = New Management.ManagementObjectSearcher("root\cimv2", "Select * from Win32_Battery")
        batteryReturn = batterySearch.Get
        
        For Each baseobject In batteryReturn
            results += baseobject("DeviceID")
        Next

        Messagebox.show(results, "Battery serial:")

(If you run this code on VB.NET 2010 (with .NET 4 FW), you may get a message saying the ManagementObject classes aren't defined. In that case, you'll need to follow these steps to get it to run properly)

At work, we have a fleet of about 2000 Dell laptops of varying models. When I run the application on several of these machines, I notice that there are strange differences in serial numbers between computers of the same model. For example :

Dell Latitude 2110 - "144SMPDELL 4H63611"
Dell Latitude 2110 - "4547SMPDELL 4H6360C"
Dell Latitude 2110 - "1841Samsung SDIDELL 6P1470A"
Dell Vostro 1510 - "11Dell" (all Dell Vostro 1510s report their battery serial as "11Dell")

Some have three preceding digits, some have four. Most have SMPDELL, others have Samsung SDIDELL.

These netbooks were all purchased at the same time, created in the same batch (as the serial numbers printed on the netbook (not the battery) are sequential). Some of the numbers returned by my program line up with the sticker that's printed on the bottom of every battery, while some don't.

What I'm wondering is, is my application returning the wrong information? Is it actually returning video card data (based on the SDI string) or even CPU data (based on the SMP line)? Do you see a pattern in all of this? If you run the program, what output do you see?

This kind of information would be handy to decode so I can "guess" more about a laptop / netbook (e.g. when it was made, where etc.)

 

[Gopher2011]

Its unlikely dell make batterys. In the same way only (mostly) 3 companies made CR tubes Panasonic, Sony and Phillips (i think), and the rest of them just bought their lower end tubes of them, IE unknown brand tv's were just re-boxed panasonic etc tubes.

In a similar manner The Dell battery is unlikely to be that sophisticated, while it may have a id number its likely to be pretty dumb like an rfid chip batch processed and stored as ascii somewhere - if at all. If this is the case I suspect dell take big deliveries of batterys and the warehosue staff don't generally rotate stock as well as they should

Other wise the OS gives it a random name in case the user attaches another external battery so hardware settings can see them as 2 items.