The Mysterious Dell Express Service Code

Love or hate Dell, they do do a few things right. They provide a Service Tag on every PC with which you can get a host of information off their support site. Drivers, manuals, you name it. The service tag is generally on a little black tag someplace on the case. On the tag there is also an Express Service Code. If ever you call for tech support on your Dell computer, you will be asked to enter this number to route your call correctly. Now, you don't actually need it, but it is handy to have.

The service tag is in the BIOS and can be extracted fairly easily, at least from a windows machine with WMI enabled. A simple little python script to do so would look like:

import win32com.client as w32c
comp = "."
wmi = w32c.Dispatch("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")
wbem = wmi.ConnectServer(comp,"root\cimv2")
colItems = wbem.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_SystemEnclosure")
for chassis in colItems:
    if 12 in chassis.ChassisTypes:
        continue
    print ("Service Tag: %s" % str(chassis.SerialNumber))
    continue

Not bad. Looks almost identical to it's VBScript counterpart

Now, the real question is: If I have the service tag, but not the express service code, how do I get the express service code?

Good question. There are a few tools^{1 2} online that will generate an Express Service Code from a service tag.

Digging a bit deeper, we find that the service tag is simply a base 36 number. We also discover that the express service code is simply the bae 10 representation of the service tag. Ah ha! We can handle this! We could always use VBScript to do the conversion³. But that would be too easy, so we'll use Python

print ("Express Service Code: %s" % str(int(service_tag,36)))

Tough, wasn't it?