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Showing posts from April, 2017

New Enclosure Types For "Convertible" Laptops

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When is a laptop not a laptop? When it's a 2-in-1 convertible device or tablet with attached keyboard.  To this end you may now encounter devices whose Chassis Type is changed from "Notebook" to "Convertible" after a BIOS update.  This change is being driven by the SMBIOS 3.0 Specification which is an industry standard. So why do we care?  In many cases enterprise admins tasked with deploying new PCs will make a distinction between a Laptop and a Desktop and apply different policies or software accordingly. For a laptop, the Win32_SystemEnclosure class might show a value of 9 (Laptop) or 10 (Notebook) for the ChassisTypes field. If these are the only values used with a WMI query to identify a laptop then you may miss some devices. With the new SMBIOS 3.0 Specification you would want to add the following: 30 - Tablet 31 - Convertible 32 - Detachable  For example, the new ThinkPad Yoga 370 will have a value of 31 since it can convert from a Notebook form fa