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!
