Dell Service Tags to Express Service Codes with Powershell

Knowing the Express Service Code greatly speeds up your Dell support experience. Unfortunately they can't be read from WMI like Service Tags. You can use a tool to convert the tags / codes on Dell's website, but that is not always convenient and for Enterprise customers often not feasible (f. ex. because you need to convert 1000+ Tags).

I couldn't find a Powershell converter for this task on the internet, but lots of VB and JS variants. So I went ahead and made one.

function convertfrom-base36 {


    [CmdletBinding()]

    param ([parameter(valuefrompipeline=$true, HelpMessage="Alphadecimal string to convert")][string]$ToConvert="")

    $CharList = "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"

    $inputarray = $ToConvert.tolower().tochararray()

    [array]::reverse($inputarray)
    [long]$result=0

    $pos=0
    foreach ($c in $inputarray)  {

		$result += $CharList.IndexOf($c) * [long][Math]::Pow(36, $pos)

        $pos++

    }

    $result
<#

.SYNOPSIS

Converts an alphadecimal (base36) string to a decimal (base10) number.
.DESCRIPTION

Primarily made to convert Dell Service Tags to Dell Express Service Codes,

this function will convert alphadecimal strings to int64.
Not much (nothing) has been done to validate inputs or catch overflows.
V 1.0 Mirko Schnellbach 10 June 2011
.PARAMETER ToConvert

The alphadecimal string to convert.
.INPUTS

String. The alphadecimal string to convert.
.OUTPUTS

int64. Base10 representation of input.
.LINK

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/my_systems_info/express_service_code?c=us&l=en&s=gen
.EXAMPLE

"BQHW92J" | convertfrom-base36
25546784491
.EXAMPLE

convertfrom-base36 "BQHW92J"
25546784491

#> }

By mirko at 10.06.2011 - 13:06 | mirko's blog | login to post comments

Thanks and credit

To Michael Stum for his C# version!

By mirko at Fri, 10/06/2011 - 13:37 | login to post comments

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Dell Service Tags to Express Service Codes with Powershell

Thanks and credit