Score: 3/5
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Product Key Finder 2.2.3
Total keys supported: 200
Supported products include: Windows, Microsoft Office
Its attempts to install a browser toolbar didn't get Product Key Finder off to a good start. And the program's product support isn't exactly up-to-date, either: it managed to find the keys for Office 2010 and Windows 7 on our test PC, but that was all. It's extremely easy to use, and can save whatever it finds in a CSV file as a record, but that's not really good enough. You'll get better results elsewhere.
Score: 2/5
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ProduKey 1.53
Total keys supported: 15
Supported products include: Windows, Microsoft Office, SQL Server 2000/2005, Exchange Server 2000/2003
ProduKey is a tiny product key finder which only supports a few Microsoft products: Windows, Microsoft Office (2000-2010), SQL Server (2000/2005) and Exchange Server (2000/2003). Fairly basic, then, but the lack of any annoying adware bundled with the program is a plus point. And it has some useful command-line options, which include the ability to display product keys for all the computers on your network from one location.
Score: 3.5/5
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SIW Home 2011 (build 1029i)
Total keys supported: 150
Supported products include: Windows, Office, Visual Studio, CyberLink PowerDVD
SIW Home is a free-for-personal-user system information tool. It's actually best at telling you everything there is to know about your PC hardware, but it's not bad at software, either (click Software > Licenses), providing 7 product keys on our test PC and supporting 150+ products overall. This free version can't export your licences as a report, but you can still copy them to the clipboard so they're easy enough to save.
Score: 4/5
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Windows Product Key Finder Pro 2.3.0.0
Total keys supported: 10
Supported products include: Windows XP/ Vista/ 7/ Server 2003/ 2008, Office XP/ 2003/ 2007/ 2010
Care is required when installing Windows Product Key Finder Pro, as it tries to install no less than two browser toolbars. Once you've got through setup, though, the program proves a good basic key finder, able to locate product keys for both Windows (including Server 2003 and Server 2008) and Office XP/ 2003/ 2007/ 2010, and save and print them all with a click.
Score: 3/5
Conclusion
If you're looking for a simple product key finder, which will just report the keys for Windows and Microsoft Office, then just about any of our 10 will do the job. But our pick would probably be NirSoft's ProduKey. It's small and basic, but doesn't come bundled with annoying adware (a rarity in this area), and can collect keys from across your network.
If you'd like to try to record more product keys then we'd recommend either SIW Home 2011 or Belarc Advisor. Both are superb system information tools which can also record quite a few software licence details: they're powerful, yet easy to use.
But if you're just after finding the maximum number of product keys alone then an honourable mention has to go to LicenseCrawler. The program's report looks like a dump of your Registry, and really isn't for PC beginners. But if you're an experienced user then you'll find this finds and reports more product keys than any other free tool, and the report can easily be saved to a text file for quick reference when you're next reinstalling.
