Posts in category servicetag

Dell Express Service Code Program

When you buy a Dell with Windows on it, you get a little program pre-installed that will tell you the service code of your machine. This is a handy little tool for tech support, especially if your machine is in a hard to reach location. Simply fire up the program and BAM! There is your service tag

Today I was cleaning up a PC today getting it ready to cycle it out of the company. In my hacking and slashing of data, I deleted the dell directory in which the Service Tag program resides. Not a huge deal. However, I do like the convenience of the program. So, as a quick fix, I copied the dell directory from another machine. I then started the program and it worked beautifully. Or at least it appeared to. Upon further inspection, I realized that the service tag it reported, was the service tag of the machine from which I copied the program. That seemed weird. I was under the impression that the program pulled the service tag from the BIOS as I have discussed previously. Apparently I was wrong. Let the digging being.

In the dell directory there is the EXPRESS.EXE program and an accompanying EXPRESS.INI file. Looking in the EXPRESS.INI file we find: 

[ServiceTag]
# Set this to zero to disable searching for a service tag in BIOS. Only do this if you are having problems
# with GPFs.
LookForServiceTag=0
SysInfoFile=C:\DELL\SYSINFO.DAT

Dell programmed a way to read the service tag from a file instead of the BIOS. It looks as if they did this as a backup measure. However, after taking a sample of other Dell machines in the network. It appears that a value of 0 for the LookForServiceTag option is the default.

Next, we see what we can surmise to be the data file containing the service tag: SYSINFO.DAT. Hmm, a DAT file. Sounds important. Now, file extensions really don't mean a thing as far as how the actual file is structured, but it sounds as if this file might be a binary file. Opening it up in our trusty Notepad we find that not to be true. It appears to be a simple ini style file with the following: 

[ServiceTag] 
ServiceTag=<service tag>

Now, why they decided to create a whole other file to store that, I haven't a clue. Seems to me they should have simply put it in EXPRESS.INI

Getting the feeling of bad design with regards to the EXPRESS.EXE program, I decided to see how well it reacted to different "environments".

  1. Removing the EXPRESS.INI and SYSINFO.DAT files from the dell directory cause the program to fail on startup
  2. Removing the SYSINFO.DAT file causes the program to not display any service tag
  3. Setting LookForServiceTag to 1 had no effect. With the SYSINFO.DAT file present, the old service tag was returned. With it missing, the service tag was blank.

Why Dell decided to write such a broken program, I'm not sure. Perhaps there are some arcane incantations that can be performed with EXPRESS.EXE that actually make it useful. However, as I'm not in the Cult of the Dell, I'm not sure I'll ever know. If someone out there can divulge the secret, I'd be interested in finding out.