Alpaca Portrait Posted February 2, 2009 Share Posted February 2, 2009 A friend of mine has a Toshiba laptop (w/Vista) she got at Best Buy or somewhere and was complaining to me about what she thought was an excess of useless stuff installled on it, like trial offers, online service stuff, etc., and also that it seemed to have too much running automatically at startup. I made a few suggestions, but since I have yet to sit down in front of a Vista PC I didn't want to be too aggressive in what I told her to do. I don't know what her processor specs are, but I know her HDD is formatted as one big partition.She's seen how I set up my PCs with multiple partitions and keeping the data separate from the OS and would like to do the same. She said she didn't think it came with any recovery CDs, so does that mean it has a hidden recovery partition that would be accessed with a key sequence during the POST? If that's the case then it would only be good for returning the PC to the bloated state she wants to get away from in the first place.What would be the best way to do a clean install on her PC? Find someone who has a Vista installation CD but then use the product key that came with her laptop? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JatinBeniwal Posted February 2, 2009 Share Posted February 2, 2009 Toshiba don,t support one key recovery feature. Check laptop bag there must be cd,s in it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nitroshift Posted February 2, 2009 Share Posted February 2, 2009 Get your hands on a clean Vista DVD, and install with the key on your friend's laptop. If it doesn't activate over the internet, give Microsoft a call and they will activate it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
solar Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 For more advanced cusotmizations... you can create a similar thing as toshiba offers from a clean install DVD yes... (she would need to get her key reactivated though to it I guess by calling microsoft.. don't know about this) but an OEM key will not* work just like that with a retail version.Anyway... If you really wanna make a home made customized installation the way the OEM's hand it over to you (but with YOUR programs, YOUR settings, YOUR partitions, YOUR custom backgrounds , etc etc) one can start learning WAIK (alternatively added with vLite, MDT, and knowledge about sysprep, imageX by reading). This however is a rather advanced tinkering method... not for noobies or semi noobies nor semi noobies who think they are technical.But it is a nice joyride.. but hey... it is for the interested and will take weeks I think if you are a perfectionist to get it really right to be honest. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gunsmokingman Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 I bought a HP computer with Vista Homepremium and was not happy at all the crap that camewith it. Since I am in the Vista Sp2 beta I downloaded the latest image from Microsoft, found my sticker key on the side of the computer and used that to install Vista homepremium SP2, I had no problems with activating it with that key. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacesurfer Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 see the tutorial in the above sticky about clean installing. you can backup your activation and won't have to call ms. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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