Jay Y.Have you ever lost a software serial number or key code? Misplacing a serial key is one of the common issues for computer users.Andrea Fortunato on Outlook crash on startup (OUTLMIME.DLL): how to fix.Dmitry on Boss GX-100 Firmware Update Guide.In case the Windows installation has been performed by manually typing a OEM Product Key or using the free Windows 10 upgrade offer from Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1, this tool won't find anything in the BIOS / UEFI records, thus showing a "Unable to open MSDM table" error message instead:
Once executed, it will retrieve our Windows Product Key from the BIOS / UEFI and show it to us in a convenient pop-up window: The actual Product Key has been scrambled for obvious reasons. This handy tool can be downloaded here from the NeoSmart official blog. The tool is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10. Luckily enough, there's a great freeware tool that comes to the rescue: it's called Windows 10 Product Key Tool and is made by NeoSmart technologies, the same guys that developed the great EasyBCD software (if you don't know it, check it out!). Whenever such things happens, we most certainly want (or would've wanted) a way to retrieve that product key before it's too late. However, it can become a huge problem if you ever need to type it, which is something that can always happen in some edge-case scenarious such as: relevant hardware upgrades, damaged/erased BIOS, OS upgrades, reinstall using a different ISO image and so on.
This can be really good at times, because you won't ever need to remember or protect it - the system will do the hard work for you. The product key is now embedded into the computer BIOS or UEFI, and it can only be accessed there: this also means that we don't need to type it anymore, because it's automatically fetched by the OS during the install phase. Now almost every PC with a pre-installed copy of a Windows OS doesn't show any physical info or evidence of its product key, nor it features a Certificate of Authenticity (COA) sticker on its back, battery bay or any other place. Do you remember the good old times when PC manufacturers used to apply those fancy stickers to the back of your laptop or desktop PC depicting your Windows Product Key? If you're a system administrator you probably already know that these times are gone since Windows 8.
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