A friend of mine is in the process of changing computers and he didn't keep up with his cd key for the program. The guy recently went from a 3 bedroom home to a RV and he put all of his program cd's in a cd album but he forgot about cd keys. And as you can guess he never bothered to register the software.

Is there any way he can retrieve the key from the old computer with regedit?

Maybe I'm missing something but if he didn't register it where did he get the key from?

I'm also not sure keys are kept in the registry. That would be too easy.

-Hal

We've used a program called Belarc Advisor that can pull keys out of the registry.

Hal, The cd key was in the documentation that he trashed.

Belarc Advisor looks like it should do the trick.
Thanks dj.

Ahh, makes sense now.

-Hal

another program that works good for Microsoft is "produkey" do a google search for it and try it out. I run it on all of my customer machines before i start to work on them. It is just a little insurance.

Before you continue running that on your customers computers you may want to consider reading this
https://securityresponse.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2007-120623-4720-99

Symantec also identifies Angry IP Scanner as a security threat and disables it. That doesn't mean it's not a valid diagnostic tool.

Yes, I fail to gather any negative behavior specifically reported in that Symantec note. Well, other than Symantec's attempt to block users from obtaining the Microsoft licenses they paid for... thereby enforcing Microsoft's strangle-hold on the market, forcing people to re-purchase products if they lose their original documents. That's downright criminal... which is another reason I no longer endorse Symantec AV. I used to swear by it. No longer.