Someone further down mentioned a Raymond Chen quote, so I'll point out here that it might be useful to have a value like the one described here: https://blogs.

Someone further down mentioned a Raymond Chen quote, so I'll point out here that it might be useful to have a value like the one described here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040211-00/?p=40663/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040211-00/?p=... Summary: a video driver cheated by having its implementation of the "do you support this DirectX feature" API always return true no matter what feature was asked for (and it didn't support everything, obviously). This made things crash and led to Microsoft (who didn't write the driver) getting complaints. The solution, since DirectX features used GUIDs as their identifiers, was to take the MAC address of a new network card, use it to generate one GUID, then smash the card. Since they knew that MAC would never generate another GUID, they put in a check that would ask video drivers "do you support the <GUID from smashed network card> feature?" And if the driver claimed to support that feature, DirectX would know not to trust the driver's claims of feature support.