Well, hoping I can get some help here.
A buddy of mine just bought a used, but functional, Dell Vostro 260 Tower. The thing has apparently been upgraded to Windows 10, but the machine originally shipped with 7 installed. I figured, if the thing had a license / OEM sticker on it, I would be able to wipe the PC and install 7 using an ISO, but he told me it doesn't have a sticker.
Now, since this was upgraded to 10, I'm hoping the person who sold this to him actually did this legitimately and used the Windows 10 upgrade option from Microsoft instead of using a cracked OS or something. If he did, is there a chance the Windows 7 install key is still stored somewhere in the registry or bios? Or maybe a recovery partition? (I don't know if the original 7 recovery partition would be intact after the upgrade...)
If there isn't, I think I have a set of Windows XP and 7 upgrade I can use to wipe 10, but I wanted to be sure before doing anything.
(And before anyone tells me to stick with 10, we don't know if the OS that was used is legit or if it has anything sneaky, so we'd rather do a clean installation than risk finding malware or worse on this thing.)
Thanks for any help, folks. Sorry for the bother, I'm not used to working with prebuilt systems with no OS disks...
A buddy of mine just bought a used, but functional, Dell Vostro 260 Tower. The thing has apparently been upgraded to Windows 10, but the machine originally shipped with 7 installed. I figured, if the thing had a license / OEM sticker on it, I would be able to wipe the PC and install 7 using an ISO, but he told me it doesn't have a sticker.
Now, since this was upgraded to 10, I'm hoping the person who sold this to him actually did this legitimately and used the Windows 10 upgrade option from Microsoft instead of using a cracked OS or something. If he did, is there a chance the Windows 7 install key is still stored somewhere in the registry or bios? Or maybe a recovery partition? (I don't know if the original 7 recovery partition would be intact after the upgrade...)
If there isn't, I think I have a set of Windows XP and 7 upgrade I can use to wipe 10, but I wanted to be sure before doing anything.
(And before anyone tells me to stick with 10, we don't know if the OS that was used is legit or if it has anything sneaky, so we'd rather do a clean installation than risk finding malware or worse on this thing.)
Thanks for any help, folks. Sorry for the bother, I'm not used to working with prebuilt systems with no OS disks...