Obtaining BIOS information in Microsoft Windows

If you need to obtain information regarding the BIOS in a system running a Microsoft Windows operating system (OS), you can do so from a command prompt using the wmic command. E.g. to obtain the BIOS version, you can use wmic bios get smbiosbiosversion:

C:\>wmic bios get smbiosbiosversion
SMBIOSBIOSVersion
5.02

From the above command, I can see the BIOS version is 5.02. You can get additional information using the command wmic bios get biosversion.

C:\>wmic bios get biosversion
BIOSVersion
{"HPQOEM - 20090831", "BIOS Date: 08/31/09 13:56:34 Ver: 5.02"}

Both of the above examples were run on an HP desktop system. From the command immediately above, I can see the BIOS date as well as the version.

As another example, below are the same commands run on a Dell Inspiron 14 5447 laptop before an upgrade to the BIOS recommended by Dell.

C:\Users\P>wmic bios get biosversion
BIOSVersion
{"DELL   - 1", "A04", "INSYDE Corp. - 10000001"}


C:\Users\P>wmic bios get smbiosbiosversion
SMBIOSBIOSVersion
A04

When I ran the commands again after the BIOS update, I saw the following:

C:\Users\P>wmic bios get biosversion
BIOSVersion
{"DELL   - 1", "A07", "INSYDE Corp. - 10000001"}


C:\Users\P>wmic bios get smbiosbiosversion
SMBIOSBIOSVersion
A07

I can see the BIOS was upgraded from version A04 to A07 and that the BIOS manufacturer is INSYDE Corp.

You can also use the systeminfo command to obtain the BIOS version. Pipe the output of the command into the find command to see just the BIOS information.

C:\>systeminfo | find "BIOS"
BIOS Version:              American Megatrends Inc. 5.02, 8/31/2009

C:\>

The above output tells me not only the version and BIOS date, but also that the BIOS manufacturer is American Megatrends Inc. (AMI).

You can also obtain BIOS information by issuing the command msinfo32 at the command line. That will open a window that will show you information similar to what is shown below where you can see a line for "BIOS Version/Date":

System Information - BIOS

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Created: Sunday August 16, 2015