how do you find you KEY for windows

Oh well this could be a problem... I keep mine on top of the window frame, very handy. Maybe it's on your keyring with your other keys? Window keys tend to be very small y'know so you may have overlooked it. Failing that, the only other option I can suggest is that your cat has eaten it. If you don't have a cat... well... I'd start worrying

Try the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder and see if it works.

link

lemme know how that program works

In Win 9x/ME, you can just open Registry Editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Windows\Microsoft\Current Version - click on "Current Version", and in the right-hand panel find the directory "Product Key" and open it. For Win 95, the format oughtta be something like "xxxxx-OEM-xxxxxxx-xxxxx". For Windows 98 and ME it oughtta be the familiar five groups of five numbers and letters. For Win 2K/XP, its not so easy; its there, but its encrypted. Try Magical Jellybean Keyfinder, which oughtta work just fine for what you wanna do.

Couple notes: its a small (<260KB) .zip file, but some zip utilities, including Windows' own, occasionally ave trouble extracting it. The free-to-try version of WinRAR seems to handle extracting it without complaint.

Also, some security/privacy software will object to KeyFinder - either as you download it or when you extract it sometimes, and often when you launch i - its a .vbs script. It isn't malicious if you want it there, and it won't do anything other than reveal your M$ product keys on demand.



Belarc Advisor is a free system analysis tool that also will reveal your Windows product key, along with a bunch of other useful info.

Another system analysis tool that will reveal product keys is AIDA32

- I see while I was out rounding up links, goodfieklder beat me to the bean


I use it quite a bit ("Please help me - my computer doesn't work" types never have product codes - for anything - on hand ), and it works just fine for me.

Thanks everyone for the help. Will try the Bean and let you all know the results. Thanks again. And Annifa--if you can't help then don't waste time posting anything. Wasted time reading answer.

Well I used the Bean and the AIDA32 and both came up with the same key digits. Just it seems it still tells me it's invalid when I try the cd and do the upgrade. Oh well have to see what the problem is now. Thanks again everyone. At least now I have the Key for my windows.

Here's some more wasted reading time for ya....well actually this is for annifa so just disregard this altogether.....Annifa, It's fun running into your sarcasm, I quite enjoy it as do most other a2ker's i'm sure.....so please, if you can't help with the actual problem keep helping by livening up some of these.....ahem......threads.

ylee, that's wierd - a double report of the same key oughtta be pretty near a sure thing ... I imagine this is a dumb question, but are you typing the digits and letters correctly when you enter them? Mebbe mixing a "B" for an "8" or something like that ...

Yes Timber I tried it several times and made sure I had it right. Tried lower case and large letters and everything. A friend works for a computer company gave me the cd and even a key for it which doesn't work either. So I don't know what is wrong. They are coming over to try it themselves, so till then I quit. ha ha Thanks for the help though with finding my Key, that's still a good thing to have.

Perhaps another dumb question, but are you using the correct CD?

That's a very good point - the authentication process will expect the install CD to be keyed the same as the installed Windows - there's a way around that, but it ain't for the timid.

As far as I know it's the right cd. We even tried the key that comes with the cd and it wouldn't work. Still kept saying invalid. Well hopefully when my friend visits, they can figure it out. It should have worked with the upgrade cd but my computer is being very stubborn about it. Thanks for the help though. It's really appreciated.

Actually, I sorta misdirected you a bit there; the CD doesn't contain a product code per se; it has an algorithm which will "recognize" a product key as valid for the version of Windows installed. I dunno for sure if it happens in Win2K, but with WinXP, an unintended consequence of Service Pack updating can be that the algo no longer recognizes the original product key as valid - same thing might happen with Win2K/SP4, but as I said, I dunno for sure.

I also dunno for sure if this will work for you in your situation, but it may be worth an "at your own risk" shot; this does work to bypass the product code requirement for a Win2K installation or upgrade.

Locate the i386 directory in your Windows folder. Look for a file named "setupp.ini", right-click it, select "Properties", and un-click "Read Only", then open the file in any text editor - Notepad should work fine. You oughtta see something like

"[Pid]
ExtraData=6166656C736263737373B2574A0581
Pid=51873***", with "***" being 3 digits, typically "0"s. Replace the digits at the end with "270".

It should now read something like this:

"[Pid]
ExtraData=6166656C736263737373B2574A0581
Pid=51873270"

This might let you proceed with your Windows Component installations without having to enter a product code. Of course, bear in mind we're dealing with Windows here, so amazingly inconvenient unintended consequences always are a possibilty. I would suggest, before trying this, you copy the unmodified "setupp.ini" to somewhere other than your i386 directory, just in case. If really unfortunate things happen, you should be able to at least recover to where you were by overwriting the modified file with the saved unmodified copy. Note, I said "MIGHT let you" and "SHOULD be able to"

You know, another thought just occurred to me - you mentioned upgrading from Win98 to Win2K - again, I dunno if this applies in your situatuion, but IF your original Win98 was OEM - pre-installed by your machine's vendor, as opposed to a standalone full license version, and IF the Win2K version you used for the upgrade was an upgrade, not a full license version, that might have something to do with your problem, though I'd think that if you successfully installed Win2K over your Win 98 in the first place, that isn't the deal. This problem you're having has me perplexed.

At any event, I hope you get this worked out OK and soon, and I'd sure like to know how things develop - if they do


Good luck.