Windows 8 Product Key

[JimmyH]

I bought my wife an X550C for her birthday and sure as a bear ****s in the woods, one week after the warranty expired, her HDD did what the bear was doing.
Now, being that I have my own little PC business, I changed over the HDD only to find that there is no product key on the underside of the laptop and because there is no recovery media supplied any more, I am in a bit of a bind.

For starters, to install Windows 8 or 8.1, you need a key.

[Myk_SilentShado]

Hey mate, the X550C...does it have UEFI BIOS or the older one? if it's got UEFI, the serial is saved in BIOS.

[JimmyH]

Well how do you activate it?? I put the new drive in, when I go to install Win 8 it asks for a key, well I have a temp key I use for that, but I have no idea how to activate it. I have tried Belarc Advisor, but it says no active keys.

[cl-Albert]

JimmyH wrote:
Well how do you activate it?? I put the new drive in, when I go to install Win 8 it asks for a key, well I have a temp key I use for that, but I have no idea how to activate it. I have tried Belarc Advisor, but it says no active keys.

Unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with this myself, but if you haven't tried searching the forums, there's some posts by other members about clean installs.
From what I've read it sounds like you wanted to run Belarc Advisor when the original hard drive was working to get the key, so it may be too late now although it also sounds like the ASUS OEM Win8 product key will not work with all the Win8 images that you can get.

Consider contacting your local support through this contact page for suggestions to get the product key (not sure if they can help or not), or if you are interested, reinstalling Windows to the new hard drive by sending in the notebook for repair.

Otherwise, if you are able to get your hands on another notebook of the exact same model, use ASUS Backtracker to save the recovery partition and reinstall it to your system. More information about ASUS Backtracker can be found at this thread:
http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?40548-Backing-up-your-ASUS-factory-Win8-Recovery-Partition&...

Good luck and hope this helps!

[Radunnn]

how a key can be saved in the bios?

[JimmyH]

Well I operate a small work from home PC business. Now I ran into the same problem with ACER as well. Apparently somewhere in the small print it states that your product key is stored within BIOS once it has been registered. With ACER though, they wanted $220 for a new drive imaged with Windows 8.

Hope it's not the same with ASUS.

[florizel]

The key is embedded in BIOS and can be retrieve it. Here's an article on it.

http://www.nextofwindows.com/how-to-retrieve-windows-8-oem-product-key-from-bios/

[cl-Albert]

JimmyH wrote:
Well I operate a small work from home PC business. Now I ran into the same problem with ACER as well. Apparently somewhere in the small print it states that your product key is stored within BIOS once it has been registered. With ACER though, they wanted $220 for a new drive imaged with Windows 8.

Hope it's not the same with ASUS.

Sorry for not mentioning it sooner, but for customers who have ASUS Notebooks that came with Win8 (and have not erased the recovery partition), it's a good idea to back up the recovery partition to a USB drive with the ASUS Backtracker Software as mentioned in the thread below.
http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?40548-Backing-up-your-ASUS-factory-Win8-Recovery-Partition&...

[sakumi30]

To find out product key in Windows 8, you can check out SmartKey Product Key Recovery.
Get it from http://www.recoverlostpassword.com/products/productkeyrecovery.html

[Korth]

You can install the Windows 10 beta (aka "Technical Preview") for free and run it for a while, until some time in Q3/2015 I think. In fact, if it turns out you really like Win10, you can even buy it outright whenever Microsoft launches it.

Or, unless you have some particular attachment to Windows (like, say, you always need the latest DirectX and games) then you would do well to install a linux. Most are free. All are actively supported (by many, many more dedicated and qualified nerds than profit-driven Microsoft could ever afford to hire). The infamous days of user-hostile linux cryptic command lines and such are long, long gone - most of the distros are user-friendly GUI-driven smart, automated, slick, and elegant. And easy. It's as easy to learn a linux GUI as it is to learn a Windows GUI or a (linux-based) Mac GUI or a (linux-based) Android GUI or a (linux-based) iThing GUI. And every distro comes with all the very same web, apps, and office stuff (OpenOffice, ftw!) that you'll find in Windows - plus sometimes a few pro tools which won't run on anything else - they can even fully emulate Windows (although, for anything newer than WinXP, you'd still need to actually have a copy of Windows to install, of course)

If you need a good free OS then I strongly advise trying out linux Mint. Worst case, you decide it sucks after a while and buy a new Windows key (and keep buying new WIndows keys over and over again, lol).