How to Find Your Lost Windows or Office Product Keys If you’re planning on doing a reinstall of Windows but can’t find your product key, you’re in luck because it’s stored in the Windows Registry… it’s just not easy to find, and it’s impossible to read without some help. Luckily, we’re here to help. As you can see in the screenshot above, the product ID is stored in the registry but is in a binary format that can’t be read by humans unless you are some sort of Cylon. You aren’t, are you? We’re not really sure why Microsoft went to great lengths to make it difficult to see the product keys for their software, especially since they are stored right in there in the registry and can be read by software, if not by humans. We can only assume that they don’t want anybody to re-use a key from an old computer. The great thing is that you can even recover a key from a computer that won’t boot anymore. All you need is access to the disk drive from a working computer. Keep reading for more. Finding the Windows Key Without Any Software Assuming you can boot your computer without any problems, you can easily create a simple VBscript that will read the value out of the registry and then translate it into the format that you need for reinstalling. We’re not sure where this script came from, but reader raphoenix posted it on our forum a long time ago, so we’re sharing it here for you. Copy and paste the following into a Notepad window: GO HERE TO READ MORE http://www.howtogeek.com/206329/how-to-find-your-lost-windows-or-office-product-keys/
Yes it is a good way to get any software's product key if re-installing any old useful software. you can not find it directly in registry because it because of binary format.
