See if you can read the serial numbers off the labels. Also use software like CPU-Z, but there are limits to what you can do there. Having written some software to uniquely identify computers, I can offer some input:
- Most/all modern CPUs do not have a software-readable serial number. Intel tried to add one in the late 1990s with the Pentium III, but there was such an uproar that they discontinued this feature. The best you can do with a CPU is to identify the particular model/stepping, which CPU-Z does a nice job of.
Motherboards often, but not always, contain unique information in the SMBios portion of memory. Computers from major OEMs typically have a serial number in here somewhere - but I have seen even the major OEMs screw this up. Note that it could probably be reprogrammed with special tools proprietary to the motherboard. You can read it using WMI. From a command prompt:
C:\Users\testuser> wmic wmic:root\cli> BASEBOARD
Scroll to the right to find the identifying information.
- You can get the MAC address of your network card, which is always a unique number. Run
ipconfig /all
from a command prompt, and look forPhysical Address
. - Newer versions of Windows offer an easy way to read the hard drive serial number via WMI. Follow the previous example, but enter
DISKDRIVE
instead ofBASEBOARD
. Look for theSerialNumber
column. - I haven't seen that RAM would have a unique serial number. The best I can suggest is record all information about RAM via CPU-Z.