If you have purchased and installed genuine software on your computer, but you have lost its product key (aka license or CD key), then let’s check out in this post how to recover that key from the Windows Registry itself.
Product Key Finder is a free Windows based application which allows you to scan your registry for product keys. In order to extract product keys from Windows registry all you need to do is to install and run the utility on your Windows XP/7/8/8.1/10 (x86 and x64) based machine. The utility will scan your registry for keys and will show you a list of all of them:
Apart from GUI, this application also runs in Command Prompt:
If you’d like to run this application via CMD, then following are the parameters that you should use:
- /csv: This command outputs the license key to the current directory in CSV format.
- /remote computer name: This command queries the remove host for licensing information. For Example: “ProductKeyFinder.exe /remote DailyTechTuts-VM01“. /csv is used when /remote is specified.
The free version of the software allows you to extract keys for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat products, while the paid version of the software allows you to extract product keys of 8000+ software! Some of them are as follows:
- Windows OS itself i.e. Windows XP/2000/Vista/7/8/8.1/10.
- Windows server 2008 and higher.
- Security software like Avira, Zone Alarm, Symantec etc.
- Adobe products like Reader, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Premier etc.
- TechSmith products like Camtasia Studio etc.
- Download managers like Internet Download Manager etc.
- Microsoft Office.
- Macromedia Dreamweaver.
- Dragon Naturally Speaking.
- Steam, Electronic Arts, Activision and many other game keys.
- and many more…
Some more features of the paid application are as follows:
- Once the application has scanned your entire registry for product keys, you can export all of them in Text file, Word, Excel, PDF, HTML, CSV and XML format.
- The application allows you to scan external HDD or some other Windows OS for product keys.
- It allows you to scan a remote network by means of an IP address or an IP range. If a host requires Username and Password for authentication purpose before connecting, then the application allows you to specify these credentials.
- You can also scan Adobe cache.db and .reg files using this application.