windows 7 HardwareID

TomKane has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am trying to find a unique windows value that I can use for basing a product key on. I have been fetching the machine ID on XP and Vista from the registry and that works fine. However, I've just been working with Windows 7 und alles kaput.

The following works fine with XP and Vista:

my $Machine = Win32::TieRegistry->new(
                "LMachine/Software/Microsoft/MSLicensing/HardwareID",
                { Access=>"KEY_READ", Delimiter => '/', },
            ) ;
[download]

But on Windows 7, $Machine is undefined. I've tried every conceivable permutation that I can imagine ... and then some. Even running that snippet as an administrator. I can get and set values under HKEY_CURRENT_USER in Win7 fine. I just can't pull in values from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

It sorta looks like I need to brush up on the Win7 administration of rights and privileges. Any suggestions on what I need to be looking into would be welcome.

Maybe my goal is wrong. Does anyone know of any other unique identifier for Windows machines?

Thanks.

Comment on windows 7 HardwareID Download Code

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Re: windows 7 HardwareID by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Nov 20, 2011 at 13:54 UTC
It does sound like you have stumbled-upon a Win7 difference, and I’m sure that Microsoft must talk about it somewhere on MSDN. When you find out, please report back.
Re^2: windows 7 HardwareID by TomKane (Beadle) on Nov 20, 2011 at 21:21 UTC
Thanks for your reply. Yes, I'm looking in MSDN and will continue to plug away until I can worry it out. Everything so far indicates that I should be able to use Access => "KEY_READ" in Tie::Registry as read-only doesn't endanger the Windows 7 security. I'll share whatever I come up with.	[reply]