Hello lovely people of MDL, friends Acer laptop, purchased new with Win8 Core needs sorting, from first glance it seems my best option is to format the HDD, completely deleting all partitions, and install Win8 from scratch. (Malwarebytes had 1500+ entries, god only knows what he has been doing) At present it has original windows 8.0 on it, which loads, barely, and all the recovery methods I have tried do not work, leading me to believe the recovery partition needs to go also. I am not sure about this whole process, but I have been reading MDL forums all evening trying to figure out my plan of action, please let me know if any steps I plan on doing are pointless, I'm sure some will be. Is it as simple as downloading a Windows 8.0 MSDN image (from somewhere? maybe here?) murphy78's Windows 8.1 / Server 2012r2 with Update en-US MSDN iso files then it should auto-read the key from bios? Or do I use the 'Multi-OEM' ISO Project as I will not be able to find a Windows 8.0 MSDN image? I expect the SKU = Core, should I check all this first using instructions at Windows 8.x OEM Activation Do I need to backup any $OEM$ folders (don't really want to with all the infections though) such as windows\help --- this help folder windows\web\wallpapers --- the wallpaper folder windows\system32\OOBE\info ----- the info folder Is it best to just go straight to Windows 8.1 from an 8.1 iso? Or does this make my legit copy of Windows8 irrelevant? Do I need to consider .. OA2.2 and OA3.0 ? Paul