How Can I Determine if a Computer is a Laptop or a Desktop Machine?

re: How Can I Determine if a Computer is a Laptop or a Desktop Machine?

Ivan Dretvic — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 01:54:40 GMT

@ikeytiger - In Group Policy management you go to the GPO in question (that you have configured) and select it, then set the WMI Filtering filter on the right hand pane at the bottom.

Whichever site, domain or OU that the GPO is linked will utilise the WMI filter when executing.

Hope that helps.

re: How Can I Determine if a Computer is a Laptop or a Desktop Machine?

ikeytiger — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 11:26:09 GMT

Hi All

i would like to execute this script for an OU only, is this possible?

re: How Can I Determine if a Computer is a Laptop or a Desktop Machine?

dd — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 13:11:01 GMT

That 'Lunch Box' type (16) is hilarious. Guess somebody at Microsoft wanted to have a little fun.

re: How Can I Determine if a Computer is a Laptop or a Desktop Machine?

Ed WIlson — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:28:53 GMT

@Ingmar yes, I have seen several systems that report multiple values for the chassis type. You are correct.

re: How Can I Determine if a Computer is a Laptop or a Desktop Machine?

Ed Wilson — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:27:21 GMT

@Wayne_C thank you for sharing this with us. This is very useful information that I had overlooked.

re: How Can I Determine if a Computer is a Laptop or a Desktop Machine?

Ed Wilson — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:26:14 GMT

@JBensimon I am not certain how WIndows 7 determines if a laptop is present or not. But you are correct, that certain features are only available for laptops. It is possible the information comes from the bios, or even via WMI as mentioned here. I do not think overriding laptop / or not would be supported.

re: How Can I Determine if a Computer is a Laptop or a Desktop Machine?

Ed Wilson — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:24:07 GMT

@emptee Not all laptop computers report correctly. I have written about a function I wrote that uses multiple techniques to determine if a laptop or not. blogs.technet.com/.../hey-scripting-guy-weekend-scripter-how-can-i-use-wmi-to-detect-laptops.aspx

re: How Can I Determine if a Computer is a Laptop or a Desktop Machine?

Ingmar — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:40:45 GMT

One reason (apparently) why this property is an array, is because of the docking station type. My laptop returns both 10 and 12, indicating that it's a notebook with a docking station.

re: How Can I Determine if a Computer is a Laptop or a Desktop Machine?

Wayne_C — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:48:54 GMT

Starting with Windows Vista there is a new Property available within the Win32_ComputerSystem class that can be used for this.

The property is PCSystemType and a laptop should always return a value of '2'.

I have already started using this method in scripts that will only be executed on Vista and above and it makes things much easier!

Here is the MSDN link for the Win32_ComputerSystem class:

msdn.microsoft.com/.../aa394102%28VS.85%29.aspx

Happy scripting!

re: How Can I Determine if a Computer is a Laptop or a Desktop Machine?

JBensimon — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:06:10 GMT

Slight variation on the topic: how does *Windows* determine whether the computer is a desktop or a laptop/mobile computer? Many features (e.g. Windows 7 Location-Aware Printing) are only available on mobile computers, which is a shame because many desktops are also occasionally moved from place to place. So what is the determining factor in the eyes of Windows? ... and can it be told otherwise?

Thanks,

Jacques.