"Cameo" wrote

| My good old HP laptop that I had Windows 7 running on, has finally
| kicked the dust.

You might be able to plug in that disk to a working computer,
then use something like UBCD or other bootable repair disk that
provides a Registry reader. Then you just have to figure out
the Registry setting.

BUT, if you have an OEM laptop Win7 is probably not licensed
for anything but the machine it came on. That would mean that
you probably won't be able to use that key in a VM. When the
laptop dies, Windows goes with it.

This is the massive scam of product activation. No one
complains because it's nearly invisible, but down the road when
you want to install Windows on a different machine it turns out
you don't own a license to the OS you paid for. Microsoft claims
that the motherboard owns the license! They claim to have
contracted with a piece of plastic. You were just the sucker
whose money was paid.