Whenever you are moving from one PC to another, or upgrading your current one by installing a new operating system, you may want to take certain applications, programs and information with you. If you paid for a program for example, you may want to keep on using it on the new PC. The same is true when you re-install a software on the system or upgraded to a new version which did not carry over information stored by the old version. One problem that can arise here is that you cannot look up the product key anymore. Maybe you have lost the email or cannot find it anymore.
The same is true for information. If you have configured the excellent WinSCP program to save username and password, you may want to carry those over as well to the new system. The free program recALL can do that for you. It works similar to other programs of its kind but seems more extensive than programs that I come across until now.
recALL it the world’s first program that allows you to recover most of the password and also a license from damaged operating systems through native support of the systems registry files Windows. This is very useful in many instances when direct recovery is not possible. The app comes with support for almost all popular tools and apps including Windows, Microsoft Office and more. Due to the unique feature emulation of FTP, POP3 and SMTP you can recover passwords from any application supporting these protocols, even if the program is not yet supported inrecALL.
Download | And Use:
Download consists of a 2.5 MB zip folder extracting to 5.5 MB. The file is flagged by 2 out of 55 antiviruses through Virus Total as a “Hack Tool” but that is pretty standard for these types of tools because antivirus engines are flagging the potential for malicious use – it is not a concern.
To run the program just double click the extracted executable and you’ll be presented with reCALL’s simple interface.
“Automatic recovery” is enabled by default, just click Next to begin the scan:
The scan does take quite a while, around 20 minutes on my mature Windows 7 operating system. While the scan is certainly very thorough, the bulk of license keys on my system were identified during the initial 3 minutes or so, with the rest of the scan revealing very little additional information.
The software did a pretty good job of identifying licensed installations, including Windows 7 and Microsoft Office license keys as well as some of the more popular (or common) software, but in some cases it incorrectly displayed the product ID rather than the actual license key. It also correctly identified the license key for Snagit 9 but for some reason failed to identify Snagit 11, both of which are installed on the system.
Clicking Next at the completion of the scan will present options to save the results in a number of formats.
Found both the CSV and Text options to be disappointingly messy with by far the best organized being HTML There is also an option to scan for email password recovery .
Verdict:
RecALL isn't a particularly useful password or licence key finder. It did quickly detect our Windows 8.1 key, though, and the ability to intercept email and FTP traffic means it could find some logons that other programs miss.