Reinstalling Windows With A Legal License

Factual Questions
1

I was thinking about doing a clean install of my Windows 7 because over the last year I got a lot of bloat on it. I can do this from the recovery partition, I know, but a friend of mine said, I could get a clean install by loading any version of Windows.

He said, as long as I have a legal Windows 7 key, it will take my key as legit.

Is this correct? If so is there any further trick to it?

2

This is almost certainly correct. But it’s slightly misleading. Unless they’ve changed it, when you install Windows and it asks you for your license key, it will enable and install the parts of Windows appropriate to that license key. So you cannot install Windows 7 Ultimate with a Windows 7 Home Professional CD.

That said, with Windows 2000 and XP, copies of Windows supplied by Dell and HP could only be installed on Dell and HP machines respectively. I do not know if this is the case with Windows 7.

3

In the last case, that wouldn’t be a legal install. OEMd copies of the Windows can only be installed on the hardware they were sold with.

4

IIRC:
There is only one version of the install media. **Quartz **has it right.You go to install, and it learns from the key provided which version it is supposed to install. As long as you use the key that’s legal for that system, it is a legal install (and you get whatever version the key gives you, same as you have now). Not sure if there is a key extractor for Win7. I know there are programs like Magical Jelly Bean that find the keys for Windows XP, MS Office, etc. If you need to validate what your key is, you could use something like that.

5

Actually you can use the disk as you see fit, the licence is not transferable. We have OEM disks that have been used on hundreds of machines, but each one got its own licence sticker.

6

Not what the OP asked, but might be usefull.

Finding Windows Key Location on CD

You will find Windows CD key in one of the following locations:-

  1. I386 Folder/ WINNT.SFI (Open this file with notepad and you will see all the unattended information with CD Key in it)

  2. Find any Last Session.ini file and open it with notepad and you will find the CD product Key.

  3. I386 Folder/ UNATTENDED.txt

Note: Not all setup contain these files :slight_smile: