Hi Gents, A Buddy of mine has a Dell Win 7 Pro laptop and wants me to install a 500 Gig SSD with a fresh install of Windows 10 Pro. He rather not have me wipe out his HDD to do it. I know about running gatherosstate.exe and so on to obtain Genuine Ticket to do a clean install, but my friend asked if he's still have the Genuine Dell in the computer description afterwards as his laptop is totally retail, and he doesn't want it to look like it's not. I didn't know the answer, but I said I bet I could find out on My Digital Life Windows 10 Forum. So Gents can you advise? And by the way, are there any other Dell specific Tricks to do like maybe a Driver disk around? I remember Dell used to have separate Driver & OS disks. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
Quite generic your assertion. Some, not all hardware changes affects activation: The following changes are examples of hardware changes that will not impact the activation status: HDD/SSD Video card Adding extra memory The only hardware changes that can negatively impact the activation status once you upgrade are changes to the: CPU TPM Motherboard replacement
It's a laptop, how many hardware changes can there be made? For the moment the upgrade or genuine ticket will get it a HWID.
If you still have the retail key for the previous Windows 7 pro you can install that version, activate it and upgrade from there to Windows 10.
Thanks Gents. I suppose the Key should be on the back of the Laptop. Or I could probably find something like Magic Jellybean to search for it. I thought I'd better make a Bootable USB Win10 install stick in advance. (I have an untouched MS Win10 Pro 64 image.) But the MS TechBench utility won't seem to complete. I may be looking for another method.
Yes, it should be at the back. If the label for key is wore out you can then use the Magic Jellybean to search for it. I wish you good luck.
Thanks for the new info. The laptop is a Dell model Latitude E5440 and the SSD drive is a Crucial BX100 SSD 500Gb drive. I did make the Bootable USB stick for UEFI and it seems to work on my Desktop. My friend went on a Cruise (Florida) for a couple weeks with the family (must be nice) and we couldn't get together before to get the Laptop. So it will take a while before I see it.
Thanks Lobo, I'm thinking the same thing. I'll probably run Genuine Ticket on his existing drive just in case, as well as find the Serial Number before pulling the drive out. I'll just have some fun with it that way without worrying about messing up the original install. If it works I'll try adding the Dell $oem$ files as well.