After you purchase a brand new PC with Windows installed on it, one of the most important things you should write down for future reference is the product key for Windows. This product key can come very handy when reinstalling Windows or upgrading Windows to a newer version. While most of the computers have a Windows logo sticker placed somewhere on it and you can easily find the product key on this sticker, many newer computers do not carry this sticker. For example, my new Lenovo notebook computer came with Windows 10 Professional pre-installed, but it has no Windows sticker anywhere.
And because Windows comes pre-installed on these computers, there is no DVD box either that could have the product key printed on it. So how do you find the product key from such a computer. You can use the free and open-source PK Finder. This small program can fetch the encoded form of product key from your Windows’ registry, decode it and display it to you.
PK Finder is available in both installer and portable format. But there seems to be no reason to install a program like this. The portable version is good enough. You can download and run PK Finder to see the product key for your Windows PC. There is no other feature or function. You can save the product key in form of a text file or copy it to clipboard if you want.
The source code of PK Finder is available on GitHub and it reveals that GitHub is designed to work with all version of Windows from XP to 10. However, the author of this program has not tested it on any version other than Windows 8, 8.1 and 10. But looking at the code, it seems that it should not have any trouble working on other versions of Windows too.
You can download PK Finder from http://codedead.com/?page_id=1276.