windows 7 trial period?

Kotu · 21 May 2011 at 15:17

probably best if I explain the situation a bit so I don't just come across as a pirate

A friend recently got injured and is expecting to be in hospital for a few days, he was asking about a low cost tablet/netbook to use while in. I actually have an old toshiba portege which is quite a mobile laptop but it doesn't have an OS. I was planning to install ubuntu but this is likely to not work nicely with any 3g dongles he decides to buy for net access.

So the question is, am I able to use my windows 7 retail disk to install windows on this laptop but without the key. The intention is to just format it again after a week or so and I seem to remember windows gives some time to activate it. Otherwise im going to have to find the original winxp recovery disk for it.

Burnsy2023 · 21 May 2011 at 16:08

The activation grace period isn't a trial. However, this is: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/evalcenter/cc442495

kylew · 22 May 2011 at 04:14

While technically speaking, it's a grace period, for all intents and purposes it really is a trial, and many do use it as so. So to answer your question Kotu, you can indeed use the retail Windows 7 disk to install it without the key and it'll give you 30 days to activate it (though you can legitimately extend that to 120 days by using a rearm command through the command prompt) and you'll be able to use it perfectly fine within those 30 days.

Aod · 22 May 2011 at 05:59

actually, modern linux distros often have pretty good support for 3G modems in my experience

robinbredin · 22 May 2011 at 10:11

Aod
actually, modern linux distros often have pretty good support for 3G modems in my experience

+1. I would give linux Ubuntu 11.04 a try first before spending huge sums of money on Win 7.

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

marc2003 · 22 May 2011 at 10:57

i'd have no qualms about using a standard disk without a key to get the 30 days use. as MS already offer enterprise for a 90 day trial, it seems a waste of time/bandwidth downloading it.

Azuse05 · 22 May 2011 at 11:24

Tbh I'd second ubuntu for a low cost problem like this. If in doubt put it on a dvd and try it on your pc first http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/features .