We download the vast majority of our software from the internet in this day and age. Gone are the days where you had to insert a CD into a disk drive and install a program from hardware. One advantage of the hardware method is that the case for the CD, or even the CD itself, would have the product key clearly visable. If you’re downloading your software online it may be harder to find a product code.
Product keys for software are usually emailed to the address you entered when signing up to use that software, so a quick search through your inbox will usually lead you right to it. You may be doing this because you wish to ‘format’ your PC, wipe everything from your storage devices and start fresh – but you obviously don’t want to lose your software in this process so we’re going to show you another way for you to find your digital product key from your installed software.
How to find your Windows 10 Product key
Products keys for Windows 10 are a fairly complicated subject. A product key is locked to a computer’s hardware making the software harder to pirate and duplicate.
If you need to access your Windows 10 key for identification purposes then a quick command line will be able to provide you with the last five characters of your key, which should be enough for identifications. You can find this by following these steps:
- Go to your search bar at the bottom left and type in “cmd”
- The option for the Command Prompt program should appear. Right-click on this and select ‘Run as Administrator’
- A black box will open up on the screen. Simply type “slmgr -dli” and hit Enter
- After a moment, another box will appear with information including the last five characters of your Windows product key
How to find your full WIndows 10 registration key
If you wish to find your full Windows product key that will be a little more tricky. The key is stored in your registry which is fairly easy to find, but it has been encrypted. There are a couple of programs you can use to find your full Windows Key and we found Windows 9 Product Key Viewer the most reliable.
This is a simple program you can run (that doesn’t need installing) that will display your full Windows product key. It will open up an advertisement in a browser however but feel free to close that just a quickly as you’d like.
How to find product keys for software in Windows 10
If you’re looking for a solution to find multiple product keys or serial numbers for software in Windows 10, then Licensecrawler tends to be your best bet.
This software will display the product keys for software that has been installed on your computer, although the output format isn’t in any particular order and can be hard to decipher. It is simply pulling product keys from your registry into one place for you to view.
Just as before, this program doesn’t need to be installed and is run by downloading it and double-clicking the exe file, the program will scan your system and display the results in a window for you.
The original version of this article was written by our German colleagues over on pcwelt.de.