I just bought a laptop, first one I’ve ever owned. The first thing I plan to do is reformat the hard drive. It seems, however, that laptops don’t come with a Windows disc anymore. The way I understand it, I’d have to make a recovery disc, and that would just reinstall all the garbage I want to be rid of.
For my home computer, I have a full version of Vista, and an upgrade version of Windows 7 Home Premium (which is what is on the laptop). I figure I can just use these discs, but use the product key that came with the laptop.
So the question is, will Windows “know” that an OEM product key is being used with an upgrade disc? Does it matter? It seems to me that my plan should be legal, but will Microsoft get in a snit over it?
OP: You’ll be much better off to uninstall any advertising-ware & leave the manufacturer’s custom drivers & support software in place.
I recently bought a Toshiba laptop & was pleasantly suprised that other than a trial version of some name brand anti-virus, the thing was not full of advertising-ware. I think I uninstalled 2 items total.
That’s far easier and safer than trying a fresh Windows install when you don’t have a full set of retail Windows disks.
It’s been five or six years since I made the mistake of installing any Symantec products on my computer. I recall the last time, I had a hell of a time trying to get rid of it - I finally gave up and reformatted to be sure there were no lingering components.
Besides that, the laptop is running incredibly slow right now. I checked msconfig’s startup tab and my suspicions are confirmed: there are 13(!) Toshiba programs running in the background. None of these should be necessary.
I haven’t fully looked into what else is on the machine, but I see several programs in the start menu that I don’t want or need.
Trying to hunt down and uninstall all this shit will be a major headache. Far easier, and much better, to do a reformat & fresh install.
ETA: Yes, I know I could just disable the startup programs, but I don’t want them taking up space on my hard drive, either.
There’s a nice little tool called RevoUninstaller that will help streamline the process. In addition to running the uninstall program, it also searches for leftover .dll files, registry entries, etc. so that unwanted software is completely cleaned from your computer.
Really? How much space could these programs be taking up? A couple of hundred megabytes? And what’s your HDD capacity? I’m betting 500GB, at a minimum.
250 GB. Probably more than I’ll ever need on the laptop, but still… if you haven’t figured it out by now, I have a thing against having unneeded stuff on my computer. If I’m not using it, I want it gone. It’s a personal flaw, I guess.
For what it’s worth - hard drive capacity became an issue again when SSDs became popular. There are name-brand laptops with only 64GB of SSD, and some netbooks have even less.
it’s been addressed, but yes, the product key is tied to the specific version of Windows. So a Windows 7 Home Premium retail key will work with any Windows 7 Home Premium Retail disc, and vice versa, but a 7 Home Premium OEM key will likely not work with a 7 Home Premium disc, and so on.
it’s not as simple as there just being a list of valid keys on the disc, though (that would be unmanageable.) As I understand it, when you type in the product key, the setup program does some sort of hashing or checksum on the key and spits out a value, and that value is compared to something on the install disc. If they match, the key is accepted. net effect is that any key for a specific version will work with any disc of that specific version. The product key is the “license,” not the disc.
I’d be willing to be that no more than about 10 percent of laptops being purchased at the moment have SSDs. For most users, the speed versus storage issue still comes down on the side of storage, especially given the still-high cost of SSDs compared to regular hard drives.
To be quite honest, for most everyday users, i still don’t see the real benefit of SSDs until the price comes down considerably. I’ve used a few computers with SSDs, and while it’s pretty impressive to see Windows 7 boot up in about 12 seconds, and Photoshop CS4 open in about 2 seconds, having an SSD in my computer really wouldn’t add much to my computing experience.
I fire up my computer once a day (if that; sometimes it gets left one overnight), and when i open Photoshop, it’s usually because i’m going to spend a good couple of hours doing work on it. Waiting an extra minute for my computer to boot, or an extra 15 seconds for Photoshop, isn’t a make-or-break thing for me. For 99% of the stuff i do, the main speed bottleneck in my computing is me: my typing speed and my speed with the mouse.
Well, I’ve done some more looking around, and some people say it’ll work and others say it won’t… much like this thread.
I also found this method, which seems relatively painless to implement. And down in the comments, some people claim to have used their OEM key with a retail version of Windows 7 with no problems (because of what Palooka said above).
I suppose the worst case scenario, if neither of these works, would be to just use my copy of Vista on the laptop, and suffer with that until I can get Toshiba to send me an OEM disc.
I went ahead and gave it a shot. The only snag was that Windows 7 said my OEM key wasn’t valid, but gave me the option to use Microsoft’s automated voice system. So I called and went through the activation process, and no problem - Windows 7 is now activated on my laptop with the OEM key.
