How To Find Your Laptop Serial Number For Service And Driver Downloads
All laptops, regardless of manufacturer, have serial numbers. These serial numbers are unique for each laptop and differ from the laptop series number. A laptop serial number is used to identify your particular laptop. The serial number may be used when you need to take the laptop in for servicing, or it might be useful if you need to download drivers. Normally, a laptop serial number is mentioned on the bottom of a laptop and in some cases, e.g. HP, you might have to remove the battery to read it. It’s almost always a sticker and rarely is it printed on the actual laptop case. That said, stickers fade with time. If you need to find your laptop serial number, you need a more reliable way to find it. You can use PowerShell instead.
Find Laptop Serial Number
Open PowerShell and run the following command;
gwmi win32_bios | fl SerialNumber
The output for this command will be the serial number for your laptop. It may be a simple number or it may be a mix of numbers and letters. There’s no fixed length for how long or how small a serial number will be. It depends on how your laptop manufacturer allocates them.
You can of course still look at the bottom of your laptop if the sticker is still intact. The PowerShell method is best if the serial number sticker is inside the battery slot or if the sticker has faded over time, or if you don’t want to flip your laptop over.
The serial number for your laptop may go by a different name if you look it up from the sticker on the bottom of your system. The picture above is that of the bottom of a Dell Inspiron laptop. The serial number is referred to as the Service Tag.
The above command was tested on both a Dell laptop and an HP laptop and it returned the correct serial number for both. It will very likely work for other manufacturers as well since this is information that’s added to the BIOS of the system.
Using Laptop Serial Number
While all laptops have a unique serial number, they’re not all used the same way. Some manufacturers might only allot a serial number to keep track of the systems they’ve sold. Others might make significant use of it like Dell and HP do. It’s also worth mentioning that a serial number isn’t the only identifying number added to a laptop. Manufacturers may use other, additional numbers as well e.g. the Express Service Code in the previous image. These code cannot be detected via the PowerShell. If they’re important, take a photo of them when you first buy your new laptop and keep that image somewhere safe and easily accessible.
