Can you answer this ?

[cookre]

There is nothing unique in the BIOS that can be relied upon from all boards you may encounter. The newer Intel CPUs have unique CPU IDs that would be ideal for that purpose, but it's unreasonable to limit yourself to customers with newer Intel CPUs.

One does wonder how you would achieve this anyway, short of running a program to harvest the info from the client and transfer that info back so that an install package could be branded before distribution.

In any case, limiting the product to a specific box would not be very customer friendly unless you had an easy to use mechanism to support customer hardware upgrades.

Have you considered the much hated dongle?

[fnajar]

Yes, i have considered all.

I only want to know how to retrieve some id that identifies the machine of a user

[fnajar]

Yes, i have considered all.

I only want to know how to retrieve some id that identifies the machine of a user

[susn]

u not doing what whisler does with the cecksum of your computerhardware?

when doing i wish u good luck

[hassan]

I also used the HDD Serial to identify the user machine, but same problem I have got...

[Hyperspaced]

I have come into the same problem as you. I didn't want to use a HASP, also.

Checksum of BIOS sounds great, but is it worth trying ? I mean if your app is real worth it, use the HASP by all means, so nobody (but afew) can crack your app !!

It depends if your application is shareware-like or custom made.

An idea (if it's a custom made app) is to go on with the HDD serial number protection and in case of a HDD format, a simple primary serial number key that contains the client data, ie client ID (encoded AND time-based) would be returned.
Each copy of the program should have something user-distinctive (i.e. a client ID).
The user calls (phone, e-mail etc) to get a secondary key to unlock the app. Then the HDD serial number is logged in again. If the same user calls again and again (verify from primary password) then... advise him to stop pirating software !!!!! (I mean, how often do you format C: ??). Throw in some warning messages about pirating software and that the initial user would be informed etc... and you'll get results..

That's what I have done, I know it's a ***** but trust me, it works....

[lonssoft]

Lonssoft Disk Serial is a Visual Basic ActiveX control that can get your Hard-disk infomation, suchlike Controller, Model Number,Serial Number, Heads, Cylinders and etc.

As a shareware author, it can be used as a user ID to protect your VB programs from piracy.
http://www.lonssoft.com/disk.htm