How to obtain product key in motherboard BIOS?

I'm convinced my brother to finally upgrade his PC. I have assembled his new PC & waiting for him to arrive at my home with his old PC later today so we can remove hardware & install these in his new PC.

All it took was PSU issues with the old PC he purchased from MicroCenter in 2012 to upgrade! It was Windows 7 Pro but free upgraded to Windows 10 Pro. He's not good at keeping documents so we are trying to find if his old PC has the needed product key embedded in the motherboard BIOS which we will need to save him the cost of repurchasing. That might be the case anyway as I'm not sure how MicroCenter is setup with Microsoft for their in-house builds. I'm hoping it's a "Retail" version, not OEM or Volume. Perhaps there is a way to find this out, too.

So, I read online of software called RWEverything that can read from the desktop this info in BIOS. Anyone use this before or is there a better way? I guess if it's not a retail version it wouldn't matter as he would need to repurchase anyway.

Use ShowKeyPlus from our own @Superfly
ShowKeyPlus - Windows 10 Forums

Cliff S said:

Use ShowKeyPlus from our own @Superfly
ShowKeyPlus - Windows 10 Forums

Thanks Cliff S! Will do. :)

GARoss said:

Thanks Cliff S! Will do. :)

You're welcome

If it`s not Retail then you can`t reuse the key on any other PC, especially new hardware.

But if you upgraded to W10, then I think you can transfer that digital license to new hardware.

Superfly's ShowKeyPlus - Windows 10 Forums worked great! Unfortunately, my brother's old PC was OEM. He paid MS the $119.99 + tax.

Off topic here - What was odd was how MS Activates Windows. We got the email receipt for the purchase but no product license key or how to download info (didn't need the download anyway). No instructions at all, so I tried MS chat online help which is slow at best. The tech asked if we were upgrading to Win 10 when I had already said it was a clean install, new PC! After maybe 20 minutes he told me to enter my brother's email into the product key line. When I did it partially filled in a Product Key-Like series of all caps which it rejected when I hit the enter key. I gave up the "chat" & called MS. When this tech told me to looked again at the Activation window again, Windows was activated! Odd how that works! Used ShowKeyPlus again & save the Product Key info.

Thanks for the help! :)

GARoss said:

Superfly's ShowKeyPlus - Windows 10 Forums worked great! Unfortunately, my brother's old PC was OEM. He paid MS the $119.99 + tax.

Off topic here - What was odd was how MS Activates Windows. We got the email receipt for the purchase but no product license key or how to download info (didn't need the download anyway). No instructions at all, so I tried MS chat online help which is slow at best. The tech asked if we were upgrading to Win 10 when I had already said it was a clean install, new PC! After maybe 20 minutes he told me to enter my brother's email into the product key line. When I did it partially filled in a Product Key-Like series of all caps which it rejected when I hit the enter key. I gave up the "chat" & called MS. When this tech told me to looked again at the Activation window again, Windows was activated! Odd how that works! Used ShowKeyPlus again & save the Product Key info.

Thanks for the help! :)

You're welcome.

On my PC I just got last fall, I just turned it on, let Windows install, and it was´automatically activated the OEM license.
Then I went to Activation in the Settings app, entered my Pro Key, and after a reboot it had switched to Pro(it only needs to turn on and unpack and install the "extras" that pro has) I do use my Microsoft account so it saves my digital license to my Microsoft account, making reinstalling faster.

It's basically the old "is this license genuine check" that older Windows version, like Win7 had.

Here is a link to Microsoft information page about Activation: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...-10-activation

NavyLCDR said:

I'm curious as to why you did not try the method that Microsoft has provided to transfer the license for free which was linked to in my previous post?

I appreciate your post but it was too late. By the time of your post we had already begun the install of Windows 10 Home & then into the Activation process. An hour ago today I revisited my post & read your post at that time.