You can't use an OEM windows key with a RTM version and in a lot of cases now you cannot use a generic OEM disk either, you have to have the one that is from the manufacturer as the key will not activate on its own. This is how a lot of OEM's make extra money now, I know Acer charge £50+ for a new disk if you don't create one and the system fails. Even if you have an OEM Windows disk it will not activate with the OEM product key on an Acer unless you have the specific Acer Windows install disk. It is becoming common practice, the key is tied to a specific disk and the the disk looks for specific hardware. Dell for example don't even require you to activate as long as you use a Dell OEM Windows disk, in theory you can install any DELL Windows version on any Dell PC without any trouble as you will never be asked for activation.
You can get Microsoft to activate by phone by playing dumb. Or just explaining the garbage bfun posted.
You can't if it is OEM as they don't offer any OEM support, they just tell you to call the manufacturer. Trust me I have tried many times. The OEM will sometimes provide the disks for free if you are in the initial 12 month warranty period or took out an extended one.
I have another crazy idea. I have a USB universal disk drive adapter. It’s meant for HDD/SSD but might work with a standard internal DVD drive which I can yank out of my PC. It’s my Wife’s laptop so I’m morally obligated to fix it. In my opinion it runs fine but she says it’s gotten slow and she wants me to rebuild it. Since I’m dinking with it I figure I might as well throw in an extra 96GB SSD I have. It should be a good deal faster than the standard 5400RPM drive.
It's all SATA so I don't see why it wouldn't work. I have learnt to accept that my wife is always right, makes my life easier.
Get your wife a Mac. I'm dead serious. Does she game? Is she a power user? If the answer is no, there's absolutely no reason she should be using a Windows PC and it will be much less frustration for you.
Your such an apple fanboi. Macs do slow down over time too BTW. Seen it on the few Macs I have looked at for people.
It's more that I've come to the realization from actually dealing with people that Windows PCs are too complicated, clunky, and badly integrated for the vast majority of people. Great for gamers, power users, and businesses. Terrible for normal people who just want something basic for home use.
It's just that after dealing with so many family members and friends who can't figure out Windows PCs, and probably never will, I've been born again hard. For home users nowadays, I recommend Macs. Some of them are hesitant to switch because they're afraid of something different, but the reality is that in most cases, they never figured out Windows to begin with.
Personally from experience working in the industry for 12 years I don't think for home users either is inherently easier. They are both easy to use for simple things and if you don't know what you are looking for they can both be hard when things go wrong or need configuring.
Things rarely go wrong with Macs, and if they do, they have good support. Most consumer grade Windows PCs are shitpiles that require constant maintenance and have poor support. With business grade notebooks or custom built desktops, this is not true, but that's not what we're talking about. Your average Acer or Toshiba from Best Buy is a fucking shitchunk. The money your average home user who knows nothing about computers saves by going with a Windows PC is very quickly negated by all of the repair costs. You have to keep in mind that most home users are not like us. They have no idea what to do when something goes wrong. And the consumer PC repair industry is quite predatory. What they charge for most stuff is a massive ripoff if you know what computer parts actually cost.
Despite loving her Apple phone and tablet she despises MACs. I’m also not going to fork out that kind of money for a laptop.
Not buying that I am afraid. Most home users know how to do anything they need to on Windows and if installing a wireless printer in Windows is going to confuse them then it will in OS 10 too. I see people with 8+ years PC's all the time. The fact is the only parts in PC's that really go wrong are mechanical ones like fans and HDDs and these can just as easily wrong in a Mac. I very rarely get hardware calls for PC's, it is software 95% of the time. Sure I don't get as many software calls for Macs but then I only know 3 people who have one compared to 100+ who have PCs so it is all relative. Got a Mac in for the bosses daughter last Christmas. She asked me to install Windows 7 on it a week later!
@bfun Then have fun fixing her fucked up laptop. My wife is getting a Mac next time whether she wants one or not. I've had to fix so much shit on her Sony Vaio, and I'm done with it. @grim I don't know any normal people who buy desktops for home use these days, and consumer grade laptops are a bitch to fix. For home users I recommend Macbook Pros, and if they absolutely won't budge I tell them to get a Lenovo Thinkpad T-series. Most other laptops are pieces of shit. If money is a concern, get an off-lease Thinkpad from a couple of years ago. Specs don't matter much on laptops. Only build quality matters.
Mac's are only easier if you buy into Apple synchronization across everything. Then I agree it works well, but you're paying a hefty premium to be lazy.
Then again, you probably wouldn't spend as much time on problems like bfun's if you could download the latest version of the OS for $19.
Don't macs get too hot because Apple have limited the fans to decrease noise levels? I know a few people with macbooks/pros and you could probably fry an egg on them after an hour or so's heavy use. Well, at least if you get your wife a mac you can fob her off onto the APple geniuses in the Apple stores.
The average person with a macbook doesn't really know how to use it either. Most of the ones I see are pretty damn slow after 6 months, especially at startup. Then the users think superstitious things like they have too many files on the desktop or in the dock and that's why it's slow. I really fucking hate our iMac at work. Nice screen, not in colour accuracy but it looks nice despite the overly reflective glass. Besides that though... it's horrible... every window opens up tiny by default despite the monstrous resolution, applications take longer to open/close than their windows counterparts, the mouse acceleration is retarded - making the high resolution frustrating where it should be useful. Performance-wise it fills the 4GB of ram way too easily when working on a large document in any CS5 app where my win7 pc with 4GB handles the same files much better, and then of course everything is swapped to the (slow) hard drive. Even after closing the file AND the program using that ram the thing continues to be slow an unresponsive for a undetermined time after. Want to upgrade the ram or HDD? Well you better be comfortable taking the screen out with a special suction cap.... General use is stupid and unresponsive at times, especially working with windows PC's on a network (yet the windows PC's work just fine with the mac on their end...). Sometimes dragging a file from a network location will illicit no animation leaving you to wonder what is going on. Then the spinning colour wheel appears... then it turns out it did decide to drag and drop the file, into that window's titlebar where you then have to go into a menu to remove it... Other times the lack of response will lead to nothing happening, there doesn't seem to be a consistent pattern. In general I find the finder layout/s outdated and tedious to use compared to windows 7. And I use both every day. I decided to upgrade our older mac to an iMac, I really just wanted the nice screen for a decent price, so I went into it with an open mind thinking with new hardware the experience MUST be much better... It's better when it works smoothly, which seems to be around half the time in my use of it. That said, buying a shitty low price PC is a bad move for most people. Mac's do generally have a higher quality, but you're kidding yourself if you think they're in a different league all together, or get it in your head that the components are entirely different all together as most consumers assume. I can't see how a Mac makes sense for anyone, for casual use they are too expensive, for business use they are too limited and don't play nice on networks, for content creation they will work great for certain fields - but if you need fast hardware they will charge you more for it and generally it will be slower/older than what's available with a windows PC.