Oct 4

Written by: Paul McLane
10/4/2012 10:56 AM 

Here’s an item from Larry Foltran, coordinator of the corporate website and information technology at Crawford Broadcasting. I spotted it in Crawford’s engineering newsletter the Local Oscillator and share it with his permission. — Paul McLane

Not too long ago, I was in the process of backing up the data from one of our production machines in preparation for a clean rebuild when I noticed that the Windows OS license sticker had been partially peeled off. Because my intent was to upgrade to a new and larger storage drive, I would certainly need the key code to install the OS. Google lead me to a great tool that solved my problem and, in my opinion, has many helpful applications.

Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is a small, freeware application that scans your machine and retrieves the key information from the various applications you have installed — over 300 as claimed on their website. For a more robust option, they offer Recover Keys ($24.95) which supports over 3,600 programs and has a variety of other features including the ability to run from a USB drive as well as save the data to a variety of formats. The free version does allow data saving, but it is limited to TXT and CSV files.

One additional feature I discovered within this application is the ability to modify the registry information via a very simple to use window prompt. Perfect for those who are nervous to dive into the registry in normal circumstances. As an example, the name and organization entries prompted when installing most Microsoft software applications can be changed easily through this program.

Thanks Larry. Radio World welcomes tech tips, IT ideas and any other suggestions to help radio managers and engineers do their jobs.