It used to be that when you bought a computer from the store, it would have a sticker on the side with your Windows product key written on it. This was so in case you had to reinstall the computer, you could reenter the product key easily. Recently they have changed to embedding the key in the BIOS, so Windows setup can read it without you having to type it. This is better for many situations but not all. One place this doesn’t help you is if you’re installing Windows 10 as a free upgrade on one of these systems, and for some reason the activation doesn’t go right. Your Windows 10 will not be activated, and if you only had the old Windows 8 product key available, you could enter it and be in good shape.

This page details several ways to extract the hidden key from the BIOS. I had to do this today, and I was able to get the key and activate. And write the key down for next time! The software I used was RWEverything, available at rweverything.com. Once I opened that, I went to the ACPI tab, then the MSDM tab. and right there was the product key in plain text.

This entry was posted on April 5, 2016 at 1:58 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Windows Windows 10 by Scott Schrantz No Comments Yet