If you want to setup your computer system again you need to have the licenses and serial numbers at hand for all the software programs that you have purchased and registered. This does include the Windows product key but also other serial numbers for applications like Nero, Office, VMWare and pretty much every other application.
Instead of searching for the keys in your emails, manuals and receipts you could use another approach. Last month I’ve discovered SoftKey Revealer which is able to reveal the CD-Key and Serials for installed softwares on computer. It supports a huge list of software that it can recover but there are some that are not supported. Here is another sweet little application that scans the Windows Registry for Windows product keys and other serial numbers and licenses.
The License Crawler can discover application product keys and other serial numbers or licenses very quickly and supports all versions of Windows operating system from Windows 95 to Windows Vista.
It is a portable application that can be run from any location and would be a perfect fit for an USB stick. Asking clients to find serial and license keys is often very frustrating. Instead, tech support can simply run License Crawler without having to interact with the client at all. The portable file LicenseCrawler.exe is 53.5KB in size.
NOTE: Sometimes the Microsoft serial number discovered by License Crawler doesn’t match the serial number printed on your computer. Most likely, the manufacturer used just one OEM number for all his clients, instead of an unique one for each machine.. That makes the installation of Microsoft programs onto thousands of computers easier. This also means that the serial number printed on your computer hasn’t been activated yet, allowing you some degree of anonymity.
If you want to recover the serial numbers on a computer that is unable to boot up, just follow the instructions below.
1. Boot up the computer with Linux Live CD or BartPE and save the following file: Windows\System32\Config\software (no extension)
2. On another computer, open Regedit: (WIN+R) enter regedit
3. In the Registry editor, click to select HKEY_USERS, go to File > Load Hive… and browse the “software” file which you’ve saved earlier
4. Run the LicenseCrawler, select HKEY_USERS from the drop-down menu and click Start Search.
5. Once finished searching, run Regedit and select “unload hive…” from File menu.
The latest version of License Crawler which was released yesterday has a new feature where you can find CD keys on remote computers. If you run regedit, you can find “Connect Network Registry” from the File menu. I believe LicenseCrawler uses this method to connect to another computer’s registry and then search for license key. You need admin rights on the other computer for this to work.
The difference between SoftKey Revealer and License Crawler is SoftKey Revealer depend on decrypting license key structure but as for License Crawler, it has an intelligent search method which doesn’t require maintaining any key structure. That explains why License Crawler (53.5KB) file size is 28 times smaller than SoftKey Revealer (1.51MB).