Reformatting new notebook (Quick Question)

Just a quick question guys. Im planning on buying 2 Acer Extensas. Im not sure if they come with the vista disk for me to do a clean install/reformat. If they do its fine, I know what to do, but if they dont, I was wondering if I could use the vista disk I used for my comp build for both the new notebooks. (Provided that I use the individual licenses from each notebook)

Any help is greatly appreciated

 

You should be able to, I dont see why their would be any problem. If you are buying the acer's from acer, than they will come with a legitimate license code, which you can use when reinstalling the operating system. However if you are buying the laptops used or OEM, they may not come with that vista code.

If i remember correctly, with xp, you could only use the code on your laptop with the copy of the operating system you got with the computer.
I am not sure you can use the code in your system with a different vista cd.

K-TRON

 

Where are drivers going to come from?

 

Drivers will initally be genarics from the vista disk, then Ill get the new ones from their website. The notebooks are retail and will (Hopefully hehe) have legitamate licenses.

 

You can absolutly do that.

1st - Visit http://support.acer.com

Go to the download section, look up your unit and download the neccessary drivers. (I would advise not to load their empowering technology stuff or the other "free" utilities they provide, they sometimes cause headaches with other software.)

The Acer laptop will not come with a standard CD, in fact it won't have any CD's other than the system CD. The first thing the unit will ask you when you power it on is to make your recovery CD. I advise you make that CD before you start so you can always go back.

Then use your Vista CD from another machine, but use the COA that will be on the bottom of the unit. Delete all partitions and then make the ones you want. Load OS, load drivers you downloaded previously (Put them on a USB stick before you begin to make it easy) and you should be good to go.

I am a tech at a Custom computer company that also resells the Acer notebooks. We have customer's who do this all the time since they are not a fan of having their hard disk's split up into 2 seperate Fat32 partitions and are also not a fan of the "free utilities" or the 2007 Office preload that is loaded on to every unit they sell.

Good luck. The unit will have a legitamate vista sticker, any computer without a sticker technically doesn't have a license.

 

Just make sure you borrow or download the OEM CDs from a legal source (same BIT, same SP, same VERSION)....since OEM serials won't work with retail DVDs....

 

You do make a good point, where exactly do you plan to come up with a Vista CD ? I wouldn't trust any download or bit torrent site other than offical microsoft sites such as MSDN. Hopefully you plan on using a CD from a Dell PC or HP or something like that.

There isn't the media issue there used to be back in the day with XP. Having OEM, Retail, Volume media all which won't decode the other serial#'s. SP2C created a headache because they changed the algorythm for the COA with SP2C, so you can't use an SP2C COA without an SP2C CD or later.

With Vista this isn't so much of an issue anymore since all Vista CD's have all the versions on them and they all activate(you will notice the .clg files for each OS type in the I386 directory on any Vista CD). I've only seen 64bit CD vs a 32bit CD. If it says business on the CD but you input a Ultimate code, the CD will load Ultimate. You learn all this when you setup the preinstall routines for Vista(Current gold system builder for microsoft and I get that headache, I mean pleasure, of configuring the xml files for preinstalls). All my routines have the same vista business source CD. You can even load the latest service pack CD with the older code. If you were doing a repair install then you would need to have matched SP level media, if you are formatting and installing fresh then this isn't so much a concern, with Vista anyways.

The only issue that could possibly happen is with a Retail copy bought from a store, I believe it should still work as well but I can't guarantee it as I have never tried it. As long as he is using a copy that came with a new PC, he shouldn't have a problem. Done this 100 times

So far I have not run into any vista media that wouldn't accept a vista COA unless it was a 32Bit vs 64Bit issue.

Good luck with your re-install. It is the best thing you could do to your Acer notebook.

 

Yes it could be that a home premium cd would accept an ultimate code or vice versa, I haven't really played around with vista OEMs, just stuck to Vista Ultimate..
But this is an issue with XP and 2000, have faced it myself many times....So it depends upon warfart1 how much of a risk he wants to take..!!

And by the way, I would never mention any torrent site or any download source, it is upto warfart1 - which legitimate media of vista he can get his hands on..!!

 

Yes I have legitamate media (An OEM vista disk from a previous build) to do the clean install with, the only real posibility that I see is that its a vista build 6000 disk. The notebooks that I am getting will have SP1 on them. I assume it will work after the clean install, and all I have to do is get the SP from online. Ill be trying for a complete reformatting of the hard drive.