Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Recovering Windows Software Keys

If you ever need to recover a Windows-related CD installation key, these wee portable (no install needed) and free utilities could be useful…

SoftKey Revealer
  • Recover Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7 32-bit(x86) product keys.
  • Recover Microsoft Office XP/2003/2007 product keys.
  • Recover over 700 software product keys.
If you want to recover a key for a game, then use GameKey Revealer.

Nirsoft ProduKey

ProduKey is a small utility that displays the ProductID and the CD-Key of Microsoft Office (Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office 2007), Windows (Including Windows 7 and Windows Vista), Exchange Server, and SQL Server installed on your computer.

You can view this information for your current running operating system, or for another operating system/computer - by using command-line options.

The Nirsoft site has a wealth of free and extremely useful Windows-related utilities and is well worth exploring if you like that kind of thing.

Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder

The Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is a freeware utility that retrieves your Product Key (CD key) used to install windows from your registry. It also has a community-updated configuration file that retrieves product keys for many other applications. Another feature is the ability to retrieve product keys from unbootable Windows installations.

If the free utilities above can't recover the key you need, then you may want to look at the shareware Recover Keys utility, which can check for over 1,100 product keys.