My boss's company just bought 4 HP desktops with win8 pre installed. I couldn't find the 8.1 upgrade in the store and found that Microsoft says some installations of win8 can't be upgraded from the store.
But that requires a product key to even download the damn file and after a little more research I found that the product key should be encrypted in the BIOS of my desktops. How the hell can I get an encrypted key out of the BIOS to download the file?
If I can get this ISO downloaded and burnt properly, can I use the single ISO disc to upgrade all of my desktops to win8.1 or will I need to download and burn a separate ISO disc using each individual key for each computer?
If you bought the computers new and they already had Windows 8 installed, they should have come with the product keys either on the computers (or the sticker could be in the case to hide it from prying eyes) or in the documentation. If not, I would contact whomever sold you the desktops and get some answers.
This is assuming they didn't change the SOP with Windows 8.
I did do the updates. I work for a small company and although I'm not really an IT guy, just a computer enthusiast, I'm the closest to an IT guy we have.
I looked for a product key and couldn't find one. I looked on the interwebs and found some info saying that win8 had gotten away from putting the product keys in the boxes in plain text. I'll get in contact with HP and see what I can find out but if anybody has any more info on this I'd greatly appreciate it.
use http://www.magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/ or a different keyfinder if you want to find your windows 8 key hp will most likely be 0 help on that matter