Retrieve Motherboard Serial Number on a Toughbook

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VB

My company has a PC application that pulls the motherboard serial number to use as a form of software protection. We're adding some new customers who use Toughbooks (Specifically the CF29 and CF30) and instead of getting a serial number they get the the string "none".

We did quite a bit of testing and researching when deciding to use the motherboard serial number as our unique computer ID. The processor ID did not seem to be unique. The network ID (MAC address) was also deemed unreliable, as the user could have multiple and, if I recall correctly, would return different values when connections were shut down.

Does anyone know of a fix that would allow us to pull the motherboard serial number from a Toughbook?

Is there some other identifier that we just didn't find in our research that can be guaranteed to be pullable regardless of the type of computer or motherboard?

Here is the code we've been using to pull the motherboard serial number:

Public Function GetMotherBoardSerialNumber() As String
    Dim strReturn As String = String.Empty
    Dim objList As Object, obj As Object
    Try
        objList = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}").InstancesOf("Win32_BaseBoard")
        For Each obj In objList
            strReturn = obj.SerialNumber
        Next
    Catch ex As Exception
        strReturn = String.Empty
        MsgBox(ex.Message)
    End Try

    Return strReturn
End Function