Windows Product Key recovery

If I had known how bad this was, I would have bought something other than a Dell machine just to avoid the whole McAfee train wreck. It is true what many people say. The McAfee antivirus software is worse than a virus. After the first year it became ransomware, and if you want to keep it (and get it out of your hair) they want you to sign up for some subscription scheme.

The advice I get is to just reinstall windows. Then Windows "Defender" is said to provide adequate antivirus protection. Doing a reinstall will require a product key (maybe) and all of the packaging and such that came with the laptop are long gone.

Apparently (allegedly) I will not need the key to do a reinstall. Some scheme stores information in the UEFI Bios that will be applied during a reinstall of windows, or so they say. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that since my Windows activation is based on a digital license linked to my Microsoft account, it will not necessary to have the old fashioned "product key". However, I will feel a lot better having that key extracted and printed on a sheet of paper before wiping windows from the drive on my laptop. And it is fairly straightforward to do so as it turns out.

There are different sorts of windows licenses, as well as different bundlings of Windows itself. Almost certainly I have what is called an "OEM license". Why would Dell pay for anything more? This will not allow that copy of windows to be installed on any other hardware, which is just fine. If I bought a retial license, that would allow me to upgrade my motherboard and not be required to buy a new copy of windows, which makes sense.

The following seems to be a very thorough article.

• Techspot: find your product key

I launch a command prompt and (as instructed) type "wmic path softwarelicensingservice get OA3xOriginalProductKey". This does yield what looks like a product key (5 groups of 5 characters separated by dashes) and I copy it down.
Note that the "O" in OA3 is a capital letter, not a number.

I also download the visual basic script mentioned in the article above. When I run it, I get the same product key. So it looks like I am in business. Now to download the Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft.