ok i'm buying this laptop after months of deciding.
i saw 70% of all 4 star ratings was because it's packed with junksoftware.
they all recommended installing brand new OS.
firstly can i use the OS key which comes with it. it's a win 7 pro key so if i borrow my friends DVD, will the key work?
otherwise i found somewhere else i can just buy windows 7 prof key so then i can borrow my friends disk & it'll work like that. will the key work for all versions of windows 7?
if the laptop has win7 on it, then you can just install the correct version of win7 from dvd/flash memory and use the product key on the bottom of the laptop to activate.
it may require you to activate by phone if the product key is oem tied but it will allow you to install with it. (you won't need to buy another licence)
dead simple really,
can be well worth doing but not always necessary, usually just to get rid of all the hidden partitions etc so you maximise your disk space, just make sure you have downloaded the drivers and any software you may find useful, some of the software may be tied to the installation as oem so you cant download and reinstall unless you pay for a license,
check what reinstall / hidden partitions the laptop has as you can always go back to that, depending on the manufacturer, there is usually one the F keys you can press in dos to do this. alternatively, you can create a back-up disk
alternative, you can just uninstall the bloat-ware using windows uninstall. this would be my preference and if it is a dell / acer / hp home laptop etc then all the support software and security suites etc which tend to be bloatware uninstalls really easily, just run cccleaner after and do a c drive and registry clean and jobs a goodun.
the big one for me is getting rid of macafee/norton suites in favour of microsoft security essentials or other less resource hogging anti virus. you can simply download their removal respective tools and follow the instructions.
