Ask Me Help Desk - Capturing details about PCs

Hi, Can someone help me. I have several hundred Acer desktop computers and HP/Toshiba laptops in my company warehouse that they have decided to rebuild and image with windows 7. I have been asked to gather these 5 information for each machine and put that in Microsoft excel file.

Computer Name
Mac Address of Machine
Model of computer
Serial Number of Computer
PC Asset Tag

I SPECIALLY need the Mac addresses since, in most of the machine the Mac address sticker is missing or have worn out. My life is becoming hell. I keep having to turn each machine one at a time and gather these info one by one. Then I get told off for being slow.

Is it possible for me to have a file that can automatically run from my usb and extract these information and save it to that usb for each machine. It takes forever for these machines to boot up. I am fed up with the huge manual task I have to do daily. Most machine have a PC Asset Tag sticker on it as well. I am not very Technical so I could do with all the help. >email address removed per site rules<

That's heavy duty! You need professional help. You should hire somebody. This might boost the process. If you go online on the website of hp/toshiba and enter the model no of computer, you will get details of that specific PC.

Actually this is pretty easy. Go to Belarc - System Management For The Internet Age. Software license management, IT asset management, IT security audits and more. and download the Belarc Advisor to a USB flash drive (Belarc Advisor is a freebie). Power on the PC and run the Advisor, which will capture all this information and more. Save the file to the PC with a name to identify each PC. You still need to turn on each PC, but this should be a lot quicker. I had to do something similar in a past job and that's how I did it.

If there is not an asset tag on each PC, then I would print out labels to affix to each PC with a description you can use to identify the PC and maybe a barcode. Then when you work with each PC, peel off a label, stick it on the PC and use the ID as your filename.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ScottGem

Actually this is pretty easy. Go to Belarc - System Management For The Internet Age. Software license management, IT asset management, IT security audits and more. and download the Belarc Advisor to a USB flash drive (Belarc Advisor is a freebie). Power on the PC and run the Advisor, which will capture all this information and more. Save the file to the PC with a name to identify each PC. You still need to turn on each PC, but this should be a lot quicker. I had to do something similar in a past job and that's how I did it.

If there is not an asset tag on each PC, then I would print out labels to affix to each PC with a description you can use to identify the PC and maybe a barcode. Then when you work with each PC, peel off a label, stick it on the PC and use the ID as your filename.

Thanks ScottGem, that's great. I have downloaded the utility and tried it. It gives a lot of informaton that I couldn't have dreamt of. To use this utility, I have to go into windows on each machine.

Next week I have to get the MAC Address only for the next 200 machines as they have the other basic data.

At the moment I just power up the machine, hit the pause button on the keyboard and get the mac address on the dos screen and record it. I then kill the power and move to the next machine and repeat. I don't let it go into windows.

The slowest part for me is moving from machine to machine and also physically recording the mac addresses by hand. I wish I can automatically record it somehow. Save each mac address to a text files. Perhaps name each file with machine serial number so I can differentiate one mac address from another.

Is that possible? If not then I can try going into windows as you said and use the Belarc Advisoras a try next week to see how it works.

Do you have a batch file that can do this. I have never created a batch file so I would appreciate any help. Thanks.

What command do you use to get the MAC address? IPCONFIG?

If I go into windows then I will use IPCONFIG or getmac.

But I am finding that going into windows is becoming a pain. There must be something much faster. I don't want to load 500 desktops/laptops and go into windows:(

I have found that most machine have the serial number/ model bar code labels so no problem.

It's the Mac addresses that are killing me. I really don't want the machines to go into windows as some machines are slower then others to go into windows perhaps due to more apps whatever.

I was wondering If there was faster way to get MAC address and record them.

I don't have enough time to run a utility that takes ages to get all the PC bio-data when I only need the MAC addresses.

I was thinking if there was something like a boot to usb, which can read the data I want and write to that usb.

Since the machines have a serial number. I could use the serial number as a text file name for each machine and record all the data to that file and then move to next machine.

Perhaps I am thinking the impossible:)

So what DO you use to get the MAC? It may be possible for those PCs to boot to a USB or CD. But that has to be set in the BIOS if its not set, then the time it will take to set it you could just boot. I know of no way to get the MAC without getting, at least a command prompt.

If you happen to know the IP address of each machine you can easily get the MAC address from them by issuing an arp -a command. This will list the MAC address for the associated IP address. And if you need to find the hostname of an IP address use the command ping -a <IP address> and it should return the hostname of the machine or nbtstat -a <IP address>. Arp -a may not return every MAC on the network, but I bet you'll get a lot of them knocked out this way.

And also Belarc is a great tool, and I use it often to get product keys from people's workstations, but you can get pretty much all the information you need by running msinfo32. Think you can get all the information you need except for maybe the Asset Tag. If they're Dell machines you can issue the command wmic bios get serialnumber, and that will return the Service Tag of the machine.