How to Recover Windows and Office Product Keys

I get this question from time to time but haven't ever gotten around to posting an answer: How do I recover my Windows product key if I no longer have a sticker on the bottom of my laptop?

Normally the product key is printed on the CD case or sleeve for your software, but these are easily misplaced (along with the disks that go with them... but that's another blog post). Certainly these keys are contained within windows somewhere. So how do you recover those missing keys?

I spent the morning testing a handful of small applications designed to provide you a quick and easy report of your Microsoft product keys. In my testing, NirSoft's ProduKey was the easiest and most comprehensive of the bunch, providing keys not just for Windows and Office (in various versions) but also for Exchange Server and SQL Server, too. (Sure, you're not using these, but it doesn't hurt to have the features.)

Download and installation is simple. Just click "Download ProduKey" on the page linked above, unzip ProduKey.zip, and run ProduKey.exe. No need to install any software permanently on your PC, and the application is free, too. Instantly, you'll get a screen with the product keys for all the above applications. Just copy them someplace safe so you'll have them in case you need to reinstall down the road.

Note: Anti-virus software will claim that all of these applications are hazardous, usually classifying them as "hacker tools." My anti-virus app didn't prevent them from running, but it did pop up warnings that they were dangerous. Realistically there's nothing to worry about here (the apps don't transmit your keys over the Internet), but you might delete the application from your computer after you run it in order to avoid false positive warnings from your virus software down the line.