Vista Install Qestion

_Jimlad_

_Jimlad_

_Jimlad_

Soldato
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5 Jun 2005
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I'm just about to do a reinstall on a laptop that has a Vista Basic, i have the licence key on the back but no disc's the owner claims to have lost them!

What are my options? i have a Vista Disc (not used it for a while but think it's just Home Premium)

Is it possible to legally download it?

i did suggest purchasing win7 but she is unwilling :D
 
Best bet is to borrow one if you can, but I think a Vista Basic OEM disc is going to be even harder to come by than a Home OEM disc unfortunately.

If you can't find one she'll have to learn the hard way not to lose the recovery discs and cough up for a replacement.
 
I used my retail Vista Home Premium to reinstall a HP laptop that had Vista Basic licence. And it installed Basic version.
 
I think it's ok to use your disc if it's going onto the her original pc if hers was an oem which sounds like it is.

If it was a retail then even less of an issue at a guess.

But of course all of the above could be totally wrong :)
 
Last edited:
Bane said:
I used my retail Vista Home Premium to reinstall a HP laptop that had Vista Basic licence. And it installed Basic version.
Click to expand...

See, this is how I thought the whole Vista product key system worked but I've heard mixed things about it. I guess it would be worth giving a retail disc a try if this is the case.
 
I believe with Vista you need to have an OEM Disk for an OEM OS version, and a retail disk for a retail version. However, you can install any version from the disk, the product key decides which version is installed.

With Windows 7 a disk is a disk (I believe). There are plenty of guides out there that will enable you to make the Windows 7 disk install any version you like by removing the ei.cfg file.
 
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