windows serial number

Coveredinbees!!!!

I have managed to wear the number off the bottom of my laptop for vista. Is there anyway to recover the number from the PC or do I just have to prey I never need to reinstall windows?

sweep9

Try the Jellybean Keyfinder. I have included a link to a safe site...

Click Here

calvin2011

Click windows key + E and then on the left nav right click on my computer and click property and see in the bottom.

Donnie

What is the make and model of your laptop?

Coveredinbees!!!!

the key finder thing worked, Ta.

tronator

calvin2011 wrote: »

Click windows key + E and then on the left nav right click on my computer and click property and see in the bottom.

FTR, this is NOT the installation key.

mr_vampy

There's a program called Speccy, it's made by the same company who makes CCleaner. http://www.piriform.com/speccy
It's a system information tool for your PC. It gives you details on your CPU, memory, graphics, etc. It also tells you what version Windows you use and you will also find the product key there.
hope it helps

RobTang

Coveredinbees!!!! wrote: »

the key finder thing worked, Ta.

Actually, if your laptop came from a major manufacturer (and never had a clean install) its not the right key either. They use a standard activation kex they give all laptops and ship the laptop with a proper COA which key is normally never used.

If you still have the recovery partition / disc they will auto-active your copy of windows, otherwise you need to backup the activation key file if you want to install off clean media.

withabix

RobTang wrote: »

Actually, if your laptop came from a major manufacturer (and never had a clean install) its not the right key either. They use a standard activation kex they give all laptops and ship the laptop with a proper COA which key is normally never used.

If you still have the recovery partition / disc they will auto-active your copy of windows, otherwise you need to backup the activation key file if you want to install off clean media.

That's not the case in my experience, as the image they dump on the hard drive is not Activated (or even installed), the first boot up normally starts a Windows installation.

RobTang

withabix wrote: »

That's not the case in my experience, as the image they dump on the hard drive is not Activated (or even installed), the first boot up normally starts a Windows installation.

The base windows installation is always present, the initial load regenerates the installations unique identifier (SID) then installs the crap manufacturers put on (+ maybe some useful drivers), then copies the static activate key.

You can reset your pc to out-of-the-box mode using a util called sysprep.

Compare the COA keys to the key finders on bigger manufacturers and they never match, I havn't personally tried but I dont think you can activate the latter keys

Hammyman

If you use Belarc Advisor, it'll give you all the keys for all the software on your computer in a HTML file you can save.