WINE Is Not an Emulator

I post a lot about open source applications, WINE is another notable contender as it gives users an option to run many mainstream Window applications on a Linux (even Apple’s OS/X variant) platform by providing access to the Windows API’s to those host operating systems.

http://www.winehq.org/
http://appdb.winehq.org/ – List of applications supported

Ah, for those of you still running IBM’s OS/2 platform, you too can run Win32 applications with Odin:
http://odin.netlabs.org/

Cheers!

Windows Registration Key Finder

If you’re like me, you’ve probably got more than one computer configured. The problem comes when you want to re-image one of them, but don’t have an accurate idea of which software license key’s are used by individual machines. Windows makes this difficult to recover as it doesn’t store them in a logical manner where any human could find and read them.

Additionally, it’s not until late in the installation process of Windows that you even have the option to enter a key, at which time you have to call Microsoft if the key was used by a different machine. (There’s some funny logic around this related to hardware configuration changes too).

Magical Jelly Bean KeyFinder searches and displays the keys on any post Windows-95 installation:
http://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder.shtml

NOTE: This not only displays the Windows key, but also other installed software like Office and even many games.

Cheers!