I’ve been cleaning up some old computers for sale on ebay, and one of the problems I’ve been running into is software that’s bound to a particular machine, like Windows or Office, whose CD Key I no longer have. I’d like to do clean reinstalls on these machines, and I need the CD Keys in order to do that.

I keep a file of serial numbers, but some of my notes are… cryptic. I might have known what “my office computer” was three years ago but I don’t now. If I ever need to do this kind of thing again, I’ll use computer serial numbers instead of cryptic notations.

I found a utility that will help.

I used ProduKey to recover the product keys for both Windows XP and Microsoft Office XP, which saved me a lot of hassle. ProduKey worked very nicely, and even wrote out a text file containing the key information for me. According to its instructions you can even use it to retrieve keys from remote servers, but I didn’t try to do that.

Next step, sorting through the varieties of media and trying to find ones that work with the keys I’m using… keys for OEM media, for instance, don’t usually work wit retail media. Oh joy.

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