Best Site For Windows Keys

[Karleen Chura]

Whatabout Windows 10? You can still download its installer from Microsoft.com, but the software giant is no longer selling retail licenses for it. You can still use other methods to activate Windows 10 or use it , but since the OS is reaching its end of life in October 2025, it's probably wiser to install Windows 11 on any PC you're building today.

No matter how or whether you pay for it, you can download Windows 10 or download Windows 11 for free from Microsoft.com. And, in fact, you should only download it from Microsoft, as grabbing it from any other site or from a P2P network could give you malware. Microsoft offers a free media creation tool, which grabs the latest code from the Internet and then burns itself to a USB Flash drive or outputs a Windows 10 or Windows 11 ISO file you can write to a drive yourself.

If you can upgrade from Windows 10 to 11, Windows itself will let you know quite prominently when you go to Settings -> Update & Security. It may be on the top of the screen or on the side.

Kinguin, a popular key marketplace we've used a few times, was, at the time of publication, selling Windows 11 Home for $21.19 and Windows 11 Pro for $25.10. You might be able to get them for less with a Kinguin discount code though. These are all OEM keys and likely can't be used on another computer after you activate them on the first one.

We recommend paying a little extra to get a key that has "online activation," which means that it should activate automatically over the Internet. Keys that aren't marked for "online activation" may force you to call Microsoft, wait on hold and ask a phone representative for help activating. The representative may even ask for your Microsoft account, which is not great for your privacy.

"It's not a gray market. It would be like buying Adidas or Puma or Nike from a discounter, from TJ Maxx," Jordan said. "There are no legal issues with buying it from us. It's just another marketplace."

If you have an old, retail (non-OEM) copy of 10 you are no longer using on another PC, you can likely use the product key when you do a fresh install of Windows on your new PC. However, you must first make sure it's deactivated on the old PC it came from. See our article on how to transfer a Windows 10 or 11 license to a new PC for step-by-step information on how to retrieve and move your key.

The process of transferring a Windows license varies, depending upon whether you have digital or non-digital license. With a the former, you'll need to log into your Microsoft account to deactivate the old PC. And with the latter, you'll want to use a command line command to terminate the activation.

Note that if the product key comes from a prebuilt computer that came from the factory with Windows on it, it has an OEM key that may not work on a different new PC. Feel free to try it, though, because if it works you have Windows 10 or 11 for free.

Windows 11 Education is actually more full-featured than Windows 11 Home and has most of the same features as Windows 11 Pro, including BitLocker encryption, Remote Desktop and Hyper-V virtualization.

Both sites sell OEM copies of Windows at very marginally-discounted prices. For example, you can get a DVD of Windows 11 Home for $124 on Amazon or Newegg right now. But it's a DVD so it's unclear if they product key that comes with it would work with a downloaded copy of Windows. So you'd need an optical drive. Also, you have to wait for it in the mail and, for all that, you're saving $15 off of the retail price of Windows 11 Home on Microsoft.com

The easiest but most expensive way to get Windows is to buy your key directly from Microsoft.com. You can get Windows 11 Home for $139. And you can get Windows Windows 11 Pro for $199. You can get these either as downloads or on USB drives.

The one true advantage of this method is that your copy of Windows is considered a retail copy, which means that you can use the license again on another PC in the future. It can't be used on two computers at once, but if you rebuild your computer with new parts, you can use the retail license on it while an OEM key may not work.

If you have an old Windows key you can carry over from a previous build, that's your best option and effectively gives you Windows 10 or Windows 11 for free. If you don't have a key on hand, you need to decide whether you're comfortable using an unactivated version of Windows 11, which limits your customization options, has an ugly watermark and leaves you ineligible for Microsoft support.

I am using macOS on my MacBook Pro but for different reasons I do also have to use Windows 10 to make some programming now and then. I would like to use exactly the same keyboard layout in Windows and I have not found a good solution yet.

Specifically, you'll want to swap around whatever the curly braces are, and swap alt with ctrl: alt is in the same position as the command key on a Mac keyboard, and swapping it with ctrl makes ctrl-V/C/X the same motion as command-V/C/X.

I have managed to get this work with AutoHotKey. This is more complex to configure than MS PowerToys, but allows far more options, e.g. send an ASC character based on a specific key click (in comparison, PowerToys only allows to switch key shortcut to a different key shortcut - which on Czech keyboard e.g. means the key for ^ cannot be created, as the only option to write this via keyboard is AltGr + 3 - but this is written as an accent (=dead key), which is not really sufficient.

The french braces are in the same position on both keyboards. If you would like to switch the [command] and [option] keys on OS X so that they match the position (and behavior) of the [windows] and [alt] keys on a Windows keyboard, start from the Finder in OS X

I've recently started using a Mac after using Windows for 20+ years and one annoying thing is that I have to re-learn all the shortcuts. I've found that you can change small stuff like swapping the Ctrl, Fn and Option buttons, but the shortcuts themselves would still be different from what I am used to. I've also found Karabiner helpful for remapping individual keys, but it won't let me create more complex rules, such as assigning Alt-Tab to change between Windows.

The only shortcut I couldn't get working is using Alt+Shift to switch between input languages, but it's probably doable using more advanced scripting. I'm instead using Macs built-in language toggling using the Caps lock key. Top this off with Witch to enable Windows-style toggling between applications/windows and you get a full PC experience, completely customizable to your personal needs.

Most of the finder an system shortcuts are in there. You can then create your own ones by selecting "App Shortcuts", click the + button, select the app you want to modify, enter the menu title and a shortcut. This happen live with the application open. Have a dig around, you'd be surprised how many tasks can be changed.

The physical location of your Windows product key is often located on a sticker placed in difficult-to-reach spots on your PC. However, with a few commands and a little know-how, you can use the operating system to reveal your Windows 11 product key. The overall techniques for finding a product key are practically the same as they were for Windows 10, but there are subtle differences.

These techniques are best used for Windows 11 computers running the OS since purchase or for Windows 10 PCs upgraded to Windows 11 through the patch process. The product keys for enterprise PCs are distributed differently and may not be revealed using these methods.

As you can see in the figure below, the BackupProductKeyDefault key will reveal a valid Windows 11 product key. Note: This key may be different from the key revealed by the command prompt or PowerShell.

There are third-party vendors offering applications that can locate and display your Windows 11 product key for you, but the techniques explained above seem to suggest those apps may not be worth the trouble or the potential security issues.

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Recently, I discovered a neat feature in Visual Studio .NET 2008: when an Intellisense popup is visible, it usually obscures some part of your code. To see what's hidden underneath the popup window, press the Control key. This will make the popup transparent until you release the Control key - simply brilliant, and brilliantly simple.

Why can't I have that in Windows as well? And how hard can it be to write a little task bar application to make that work? The answer is: not very - primarily thanks to the .NET Framework. It took me all of two hours to get a basic functioning task bar app that makes the foreground window transparent when you press a hotkey, and turns it back to opaque when you press the hotkey again. Of course, making the transparency level and the hotkey configurable, creating an icon for the application, and adding an installer took me the rest of the day, but here it is: See Through Windows.

New in version 1.0.5 is the ability to make transparenticized windows 'Click-through'. In essence, this makes the window disappear as far as the mouse is concerned. You cannot click it anymore: mouse clicks will 'fall through' to underlying windows. You can still activate the window using Alt+Tab, however. (You'll need this to untransparenticize the window again!) Optionally, when a window is rendered 'Click-through', you can choose to keep it in front of other windows. This creates a sort of overlay on your screen that's impervious to mouse clicks - almost as if there's a glass plate with an semi-transparent image on it in front of your monitor. I'm sure you can think of some good use for that ;-)

Press the hotkey again to go back to the way things were. Incidentally: you don't have to do that: you can 'transparenticize' as many windows as you like, and turn them opaque again in any order you like - or not. When exiting, See Through Windows will change all windows back the way they were.

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