Dell Vista DVD with XPS, will it work on Inspiron?

Hi,

I have a new XPS laptop and wish to sell on my old Inspiron laptop, however I've lost all my restore disks and OS disk for it that came with it. What I do have is my OS disk and driver disks that came with my new XPS laptop.

I know I'm not able to use the driver disks on my Inspiron because it's different hardware, but do we think the OS disk will install Vista on my Inspiron?

Both have their own Vista licences stuck to the bottom of the laptop and both are licenced for Vista Home Premium, so as far as I can make out this would be lawful.

So would the OS disk work? I can't see any reason why not and suspect that the OS disk doesn't include any specific drivers or anything. The only thing I noticed is that the installation doesn't prompt for a key, so I was concerned about that part.

Any thoughts or ideas?

 

Since they're both for Vista Home Premium, it won't be a problem.

 

The OS disc will definitely work! The OS discs Dell gives out will work on any Dell system.

Basically, if the disc detects that your system is a Dell (it checks the BIOS), then it will install Vista, or whatever, onto your computer.

The installation will not require you to activate Windows using the serial number on the bottom of the laptop, because it will be automatically activated with the OEM’s serial number.

So basically fire away it will work perfectly.

Another thing to note, is say you have two laptops, both Dell’s, one came with Vista Home Premium, and one came with Vista Ultimate. Pop the Ultimate disc in the non-Ultimate laptop and bingo! Free upgrade! Not entirely sure if it is legal... (pretty sure it isn’t), but hey, I didn’t tell you .

This should be the same for most other manufacturers as well (HP, Sony, etc.) not just Dell.

Hope this helps

 

and any non dell system

 

True, but you will need to activate the copy of Window's with an unused activation code...

 

So if I install it on a Dell Laptop, no activation required, put it on a non-Dell machine and activation is required. Fair enough. Of course I won't be doing the second, I only intend to use the disk lawfully to install the software on a laptop that has a licence to do so.

Just running Driver Magician on the old laptop before wiping the lot and installing Vista once again, this way it won't matter that I don't have the original driver disks and I won't have to spend hours trawling the net trying to find what runs what

 

Worked perfectly

Old laptop is now reformatted and the driver backup made it very easy to resetup correctly.

Now it's going on Ebay