Need to recover your product key for Office or Windows XP? Well it may not seem like a big deal to keep your product keys safely, but here’s why you should. As a part-time computer consultant, it always bothers me to hear a client tell me that for whatever reason that they need to re-install their operating system and since they could not find the product keys, they went ahead and bought another copy of XP or Office! You should never have to do this!
So if the sticker on your computer is missing and you can’t find those CD cases or sleeves with the product key printed on the back, then how do you find your product keys? Well, you can install some third-party utilities that will find the keys for you in the Windows registry. However, before you stop reading and go purchase one off Google, read just a little more because you can recover your keys without having to pay anything either!
If you use NirSoft’s ProduKey software, you can get not only the product keys for Windows XP and Office products, but also SQL Server and Exchange Server, so also quite handy for those sloppy administrators who’ve misplaced their software. ProduKey is completely free and is the only software program that I found on the Internet to be free.
The software is extremely easy to install because there is no install. Simply download the zip file from the web site, unzip the files, and double click ProduKey.exe into the folder. No software is installed on to your computer! You can also just copy the .exe file onto a USB stick and run it off any computer directly from the stick since there is no installation required.
Of course, this kind of program is only useful BEFORE something goes terribly wrong with your computer, so take five minutes out of your schedule, run the software, copy the product keys to notepad and print them out for your records. Note, you don’t have to manually write your product keys down, you can right click and choose Copy Selected Items or HTML Report - All Items and print out the web page.
Also, if you get a warning or message from your anti-virus software, just ignore it as this program does not contain any spyware or viruses.
So if the sticker on your computer is missing and you can’t find those CD cases or sleeves with the product key printed on the back, then how do you find your product keys? Well, you can install some third-party utilities that will find the keys for you in the Windows registry. However, before you stop reading and go purchase one off Google, read just a little more because you can recover your keys without having to pay anything either!
If you use NirSoft’s ProduKey software, you can get not only the product keys for Windows XP and Office products, but also SQL Server and Exchange Server, so also quite handy for those sloppy administrators who’ve misplaced their software. ProduKey is completely free and is the only software program that I found on the Internet to be free.
The software is extremely easy to install because there is no install. Simply download the zip file from the web site, unzip the files, and double click ProduKey.exe into the folder. No software is installed on to your computer! You can also just copy the .exe file onto a USB stick and run it off any computer directly from the stick since there is no installation required.
Of course, this kind of program is only useful BEFORE something goes terribly wrong with your computer, so take five minutes out of your schedule, run the software, copy the product keys to notepad and print them out for your records. Note, you don’t have to manually write your product keys down, you can right click and choose Copy Selected Items or HTML Report - All Items and print out the web page.
Also, if you get a warning or message from your anti-virus software, just ignore it as this program does not contain any spyware or viruses.
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