Question about Product Keys

Hello, I have a question I hope someone can help me with.
I have a Toshiba laptop given to me by my brother, it is running Vista Home Premium 32 bit, however he has it so messed up that I wanted to do a clean reinstall of the Vista and start over with it. My problem is it came with Vista Home Premium preinstalled on it when he bought it new. I have the product key on the underneath of the laptop but he lost the disk. Now I have a disk to upgrade to Vista Home Premium which is the same as already installed on the laptop, however I don't have the product key for the disk I have.

My question is will the product key on the laptop work if I use the Vista upgrade disk. They are both the same version Home Premium.

Thank you

it should, the key is not disc specific, rather program specific. try it, if it accepts it, then yay! =D

Hi,
I agree with chaosrealm93.
Just a quick reminder.

Make sure the spare disc you have is 32bit also to match the computer, & not 64bit.





‘I do not seek to follow in the footsteps
of the men of old,
I seek the things they sought‘

Basho (1644-1694) Japanese Haiku

I tried the spare disk I had and it didn't work, when I put in the Product Key off of bottom of computer said it didn't match. Did some research online and found out I could do a restore to factory settings from hard drive, followed the directions and it got 97% done then said there was an error and to shut the laptop down. Now windows won't start at all. I did some more checking and found that I can get a restore disk from Toshiba for $24 and am thinking that this is my best bet so far.

Yes the $24.00 would solve the problem, but maybe not the best way to go.
For $100 you can get the newest and best a Windows 7 upgrade. If its affordable, I woiuld go that way. Vista is on the way out.

I would prefer to upgrade to Windows 7, but finances won't allow right now. So think I am going to have to go the $24 route.

Thanks

Thats fine, bottom line it should work.
This may help
Clean Install with a Full Version of Vista
Wish you luck

Can you not install from the recovery partition? Here is the Toshiba procedure:

Hard Disk Drive Recovery using the recovery partition.

1. Make sure the computer is turned off.
2. Press and hold the 0 (zero) key on your keyboard while powering on the computer. When the computer powers on, the Toshiba Recovery Wizard screen displays.
3. Select one of the options, and then click Next. The options are: Recovery of Factory Default Software (recommended) or Erase the hard disk.

Yea, I've tried that 5 times, each time it gets about 3/4 done then says it encountered an error and needs to be shut down.
I've went ahead and ordered the recovery disc so just waiting on it.

Time is worth something, too. I think you made a wise choice

ABR is a small program that will find you key and save it to a txt file

ABR (Activation Backup and Restore) | directedge.us