Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder 2.0.8

Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is a simple tool for finding, displaying and saving the product keys for over 300 applications, which can be a real time-saver when you need to reinstall everything at some later date.

To use the program, just install and run it, and immediately you'll see the keys of any supported applications you might have installed. Which might be Windows, Adobe Acrobat, Call of Duty, Photoshop and more.

One notable problem here is that the supported list of applications is a little on the old side. Microsoft has just released the beta of Visual Studio 2012, for instance, but the Keyfinder only supports Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. It's much the same story elsewhere, and as a result the initial report on our test PC was a little disappointing, listing only 4 products. And one of those was incorrect (for some reason it thought we had Half Life installed.)

Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder does have a significant plus point, though, in that you can edit its configuration. If you click Tools > Modify Config then you'll see the default keys it's looking for, and if you know where to look in the Registry for a particular application's product key then you can quickly add it.

As an example, the program supported finding the key for VMware Workstation 5.0 with a line like this.

VMware Workstation 5.0|Serial=HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Vmware, Inc.\Vmware Workstation\License.ws.5.0=Serial

That in itself is entirely useless, as our system had Workstation 8.0 installed. However, we were able to modify it to suit our 64-bit installation, like this.

VMware Workstation 8.0|Serial=HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Vmware, Inc.\Vmware Workstation\License.ws.8.0.e1.201010=Serial

And as a result, our program now correctly finds and displays our Workstation key.

Please note, if this kind of manual tweaking seems like too much hassle then you can alternatively opt for the commercial Recover Keys application, which is more up-to-date and supports over 3,000 applications. Prices start from $24.95 and you can find out more at the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder site.

The list of supported programs is seriously out of date, but if you're willing to do a little work then Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder can be tweaked to locate and display a reasonable number of product keys.