Yesterday when I got home from work my son told me his travel laptop was acting funny. Needless to say I took a look at it and there was no question it needed to be reformatted. It wasn't a big deal because he really didn't have much saved on it. So I flipped the laptop over to write down the Microsoft product key and I found this:

All of the numbers on the key were long gone and worn off. This is seriously not good. He was lucky that I had a extra key from when I upgraded my laptop to windows7 so I used that. However I did learn a lesson and from there I went and took pictures of all my laptops (we have 4 total) keys on the back of them. I was really surprised on how worn all the keys were but at least they were readable. If you can't photograph them then I would recommend writing them down. I took pictures of all of mine:

Without a key should you ever have to reformat you will not be able to verify your operating system.

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