Today, we're going to use several tools to find the product key for Windows,
which is the unique 25 character string of numbers or letters that you'd
normally enter during the installation of a retail copy of Windows.
At least one of the methods in this video can be used to obtain the product
key for Windows 7, 8, 10, and the server versions of Windows.
If you visit your activation screen, you may see something like this,
where your product ID is visible, but the product key itself is inaccessible.
If you have a digital license, however, you won't have a product key associated
with your license, in which case this video doesn't apply to you.
But even if you have a digital license, you can still retrieve a key from the BIOS
of a laptop, or a pre-built desktop, if the manufacturer has decided to embed it in
the BIOS. I'll cover that use case at the end of the video.
In the good old days, the product key was always printed on
a Certificate of Authenticity that came with the retail or OEM
version of Windows, and later it was affixed as a sticker somewhere on
the computer itself. These labels could appear on desktop
computers that came with their installed OEM version of Windows,
as seen on this older Dell Precision, or it could be found on laptops,
usually placed on the bottom, like this older Lenovo that came with Windows 7.
This label would be the most straightforward way to find your product
key, and even today, a boxed retail version of Windows 10 should include it.
However you'll no longer find these stickers on modern pre-built computers.
Instead, the product key is stored in the BIOS or UEFI, where it's generally
inaccessible to users. For example, it's nowhere to be found in the BIOS
of this HP Pavilion desktop computer, nor is it visible in this Dell Inspiron 5570,
both of which have the Windows 10 product key embedded in the BIOS.
To retrieve the key in a pre-built PC or laptop that came with an
OEM version of Windows 8.1 or 10 pre-installed, you can use
one of two built-in Windows tools. One is simply the Command Prompt, which
you can launch by hitting the Start button, and typing CMD. Click the resulting link
to start the Command Prompt, then type the following:
wmic
path
softwarelicensingservice
get
oa3xoriginalproductkey
Since this command is so long, I've included it in the description in case
you just want to copy and paste it. After hitting enter, the product key is
revealed. Remember, since this is an OEM license, it's tied
to the hardware on which Windows was installed.
The other method is through PowerShell, which is again
accessed by clicking the Start button, and typing powershell.
After clicking the returned result, simply type the following:
(
get-wmiobject
-query
'
select
*
from
softwarelicensingservice
'
)
.
oa3xoriginalproductkey
and press the enter key.
Again, I've included this in the description in case you just want to copy/paste.
As a side note, if i re-enter the command by pressing the up-arrow, and delete
the last part of it, it'll show you much more information about your license.
Please note that these two methods will only retrieve product keys that are stored
in the BIOS. But what if you have a PC that you built yourself, with a retail version
of Windows, or any version for which you entered the product key yourself?
If you try to use the Command Prompt method on a DIY computer that you
assembled yourself, you're unlikely to see a key returned, as you can see here.
You'll experience the same thing with PowerShell, where nothing is returned
after you enter the command. Nirsoft's Produkey is freeware that retrieves not
only BIOS-embedded Windows product keys, but those recorded in the registry
as well. As a side benefit, it can also reveal keys for Microsoft Office,
SQL Server, Visual Studio, and some Adobe and Autodesk software as well.
To download ProduKey, launch your favorite browser and search for
NirSoft ProduKey, spelled p-r-o-d-u-k-e-y.
Click on the first result that's returned, then click the link that takes
you to the Downloads section. On the off-chance that you have a 32-bit
version of Windows, you'll want to click the first link. For most of you, you'll
want to grab the second link for the 64-bit version of ProduKey. As I save
the file, there is a chance that Malwarebytes or Windows Defender will detect it as
malicious, as you can see here. But as the developer of the program attests,
many anti-virus packages will report ProduKey as a false positive. In the case
of Windows Defender, what you'll want to do is bypass the protection by allowing
the program on the device, and then click the Start Action button. Let's hit Allow
to prevent it from being blocked, after which we'll need to download it again.
Let's open the folder in which it was placed, and view the
contents of the compressed file. You can now place the content
wherever you want. For the purposes of this tutorial, I'll just drop them into
the Documents folder. Next, all you need to do is launch the ProduKey
executable. As you can see here, it can show the product key stored in the BIOS,
or, if you execute it on a non-OEM machine, it'll retrieve it from the registry.
If you log into Windows with a Microsoft account,
or you bought the license online through Microsoft,
or if you upgraded from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10
during Microsoft's free upgrade period several years ago,
then you probably have a digital license. Using NirSoft's ProduKey may still
show you a key though. Any key that's embedded in the BIOS
would still be retrievable, but your Windows 10 license would be
digital. Here I show ProduKey running on the Asus Transformer on which I
previously upgraded the original Windows 8.1 to Windows 10.
I can see the generic license key assigned by Microsoft to Windows 10,
and i can still retrieve the original Windows 8.1 key from the BIOS.
I hope you enjoyed - thanks for watching!