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Nephew has a laptop that was given him. The harddrive went out and trying to get Windows 7 installed tell me the product key is wrong. So I went to Dell, only to find the original OS was Vista and the product key on the computer was for Vista. The Service tag I used said there there was no such computer. It's supposed to be a 1750. I believe this is one of Dell's refurbished products.
Can one upgrade to Windows 10 from Vista or does he need to buy Windows 7 upgrade?
You would need Windows 7 to get a free "upgrade" to 10. That laptop supposedly can take up to 8 GB of RAM.
https://www.newegg.com/microsoft-win...82E16832588506
https://www.newegg.com/microsoft-win...82E16832588520
It already has 8GB ram in it. He got the laptop free from a friend.
They had upgraded it to windows 7 and he let Microsoft install windows 10 on it. But when the harddrive when out, I found out it had Vista on it originally as I said before. And as I said before, Dell says there is no such computer and the reason is, it's a refurbished 1750. He actually wants Windows 7 on there but he doesn't have a key for that either. He said it came with 7 but the product key is for vista not 7. And he doesn't have the windows 7 0S either, he has a disk that has Vista on it.
Is the hard drive able to be recognized when connected to another computer? If it is just unbootable, it may be possible to clone it to another drive and/or or to get the Windows 7 Product Key from it.
In the begging it wouldn't even see the hard drive, even though the BIOS said it was there.He finally it started loading files and got as far as asking for the product key, that's where we got stopped.
He's in Tennessee right now with my niece to see his 90 year old mom and they won't bee back for two weeks, and the computer is at home here so there isn't anything I can do further until they get back.
I was just asking if there was anything we could do, if he decided to go ahead and put windows 10 on there.
If you can get the Windows 7 Product Key from the non-bootable drive, you can re-install Windows 7, then upgrade for free to Windows 10 if desired.
Possibly useful links:
https://www.howtogeek.com/64600/how-...oken-computer/
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/easiest-...table-windows/
https://community.spiceworks.com/top...hat-won-t-boot
Thanks. I'll try those when he gets back from Tennessee. I'll let them know via phone that we might be able to fix it if he doesn't destroy the old drive.