Having to reinstall software is never exactly fun, but it gets particularly annoying if you’ve been unfortunate enough to lose the CD case, email or whatever else contained that application’s product key. Especially if the developer isn’t able to send you a reminder.

Even if you can’t find any record of the product key, though, you may be able to use a product key finder such as Weeny Free Key Recovery to recover it from your existing installation.

At first glance, the program doesn’t seem too impressive. It’s easy to use, yes – just launch it, and all the supported product keys are displayed right away – but the problem is that “supported” list is a little short. On our test PC, for instance, it only displayed the keys for Windows 7, Office 2010 and Axialis IconWorkshop 6.0, and the author’s website only lists a few more applications: Photoshop, AutoCAD, Call of Duty, and so on.

What’s more interesting, though, is an extra option called “Scan Plus”. Click this button and Weeny Free Key Recovery will scan your system looking for records which it thinks might be product keys – Registry or file settings which use likely keywords, for instance – before displaying them for you.

The program only supports a few applications as standard - but can detect many more

As this technique is really just a form of intelligent guessing, we weren’t surprised to see that it often made mistakes. And our final report included lots of junk entries, with many entries like the following.

Defiant Technologies DiskDigger
licenseaccepted = True

LinuxLive Advanced
skip_keyboard_detection = no

MirWoj MWSnap Settings
WarnKeys = 1

Can you see the licence-related information there? We can’t, either.

But, amongst the high volume of junk, there were also real product keys for Macrium Reflect, VMware Workstation, Cyberlink PowerProducer and more. And because the program is using a generic detection technique, it could find keys for many other apps, even those which aren’t supported by apparently more powerful key recovery tools.

The important word here is “could”, of course: there are no guarantees. But if you’re looking to recover a product key and similar tools haven’t been able to help, give Weeny Free Key Recovery a try: it’s “Scan Plus” option just might be what you need.