Resurrecting a Dell notebook

[McGraw]

Hi.

My neighbour has recently retrieved his netbook from someone who said they would fix it a year ago.

It's a dell inspiron netbook (titled this wrongly) with a 1.6ghz atom and 1gb of RAM.

It looks to me like it's had a dodgily activated copy of Win7 pro put on it as there is no recovery partition and a keyfinder confirms the partly illegible sticker key is not the same as the one being used.

Due to this delay, he's lost his win10 upgrade period but I've heard it's still possible to force it.

My questions are:

-Can the original, legit key be retrieved from a worn sticker?
-If I can put W10 on it, should I or is win7 best for this hardware?

and a bonus:

-Purely for music and video playback, is there a better linux option perhaps?

Thanks a lot.

 

[lude1962]

-Can the original, legit key be retrieved from a worn sticker?
not if win7 and you cant read the sticker, w8/8.1 should be hard coded in the bios

-If I can put W10 on it, should I or is win7 best for this hardware?
win 10 but you've no OS key, unless you can find the w10 upgrade option ( update button , may still be active, links to an exe ) is win7 showing correctly activated?

-Purely for music and video playback,
what is the source for music and vids
EDIT if he's got his media local, get a couple usb sticks give openelec a go runs quite happily with 1gb ram (it will run off usb stick so his embedded? hdd wont be touched)

 

[McGraw]

Thanks.

Will try and upgrade to 10 then go from there.

 

[Armageus]

The win7 sticker isn't necessarily the key it would have been installed with anyway (as OEMs use volume keys that validate against the bios).

You may be able to source an OEM dell install disk or recovery disk from eBay.

 

[Mujja]

As above

It would have been activated with a Dell OEM key

You'll need the OEM certificate and key, this guide explains it.

 

[AHarvey]

Hi.

My neighbour has recently retrieved his netbook from someone who said they would fix it a year ago.

-Purely for music and video playback, is there a better linux option perhaps?

If they were having someone else fix it then linux probably wouldn't be the best choice of OS anyway.

Are you sure there is no recovery partition? I've installed Win 10 on an older laptop then the person managed to activate the recovery and it downgraded to Win 7 again.