It’s Geek to Me: Understanding Windows 10 product key differences

Question: Referring to your article on the Northwest Florida Daily News website titled Microsoft doesn’t make finding your Product Key easy, I tried both methods on my Dell laptop, but the key from the cmd command and the key from the regedit windows are different. Can you elaborate on why it is different? Thanks.

– Arnab G.
Kolkata, India

The Geek’s Answer: My goodness! It’s Geek to Me may be dying on the vine here on Florida’s Emerald Coast, but it’s a very nice surprise for me to receive a submission all the way from India. Thanks for writing, Arnab.

I had to do a little digging to try and figure out which column you’re referring to. It may not be obvious to you all the way over in India, but my column is no longer being carried by the newspaper you cited. I checked their website, and I saw that numerous issues are still there. I can only assume you found me because of an Internet search.

I also assume you’re speaking about I.G.T.M. #756, Jan 16-22, 2022, in which I spoke about product keys and how to retrieve the original product key from an instance of Windows.

I believe that the answer you’re seeking is in the original article. I did provide two different methods of retrieving a product key, one from the command line via Windows Management Instrumentation Command, or WMIC, and one from the Windows registry.

The article in question was filled with cautions and caveats because the methods I provided are not 100% reliable due to changes in Windows over time.

In fact, I said of the Windows registry method, “Just to make things more complicated for you, there is a small chance that this might not be your current product key. If you’ve ever upgraded one version of Win 10 to another, such as going from Windows 10 Home Edition to Windows 10 Professional, this might be the key from the original version that was installed. It’s still a valid product key, just maybe not the one you’re looking for.”

I also mentioned that WMIC was deprecated in newer versions of Windows 10 and that the command might not return anything at all.

So, if you received a Product Key from WMIC, but it doesn’t match the one in the Registry, the chances are that the Registry key is from a previously upgraded version of Windows, and the one returned by WMIC is the Product Key from the currently running version.

I hope that is of some help to you.

Geek News Notes: Tech news headlines this week were abuzz with a relatively new phrase: “DeepSeek.”

What is it, you ask?

Well, it is the newest in the line of generative artificial intelligence large language models, akin to ChatGPT, Llama, Gemini, Mistral, and a host of others. The difference is that DeepSeek is 100% Chinese-owned, which makes it instantly suspect in the eyes of many American users.

DeepSeek is proving to be highly effective and, moreover, seems to be working within training cost constraints that are far cheaper than its American counterparts. To put it in perspective, over $100 million was poured into training OpenAI’s GPT-4 model in 2024. It is said that the equivalent training of DeepSeek was done for only $5.6 million.

Numbers like this have upended much of the thinking about the cost of AI and caused a literal nosedive in the price of high-end technology stocks. Keep your eye on this one, but be cautious and remember where it comes from.

Reports already say that DeepSeek will refuse to respond to any questions critical of China’s policies or actions, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations.

Jeff Werner, a software engineer based in Niceville, Florida, has been writing his popular “It’s Geek to Me” tech column since 2007. He shares his expertise to help readers solve everyday tech challenges. To view additional content, comment on articles, or submit a question, visit ItsGeekToMe.co (not .com!).