Windows 7 Product key find from HDD and reinstall (windows 7)

[mitt d]

Hi guys.

A friend of mine recently gave me his old laptop (toshiba satellite running win 7 home premium) which had been stepped on and broken. I pulled it apart and saved the HDD and ram for a rainy day. Prior to this I purchased a dirt cheap 15inch macbook pro. After a few months, the curiosity of mac OS X has worn off unfortunately and I am missing my old windows 7 machine. I did some research and after finding out a fresh install disk of windows is a bit more then i'd like to pay (I'm a student) I decided to try and extract the product key from the now shelled toshiba satellite's HDD. My questions are, Is this possible?, Will the newly installed win 7 on mbp be stable? and How would i go about doing this?

Thank you in advance,

Mitchell

 

[Fixer1234]

You can extract the key from the old HDD, but in all likelihood, it is for the OEM version of Windows that was pre-installed on the laptop and it won't be transferable to the other computer. If you try to use it, you will probably find that the Windows installation stops working after 30 days. If the Toshiba motherboard was still good and could be transplanted into the Macbook and you could swap the disk drives, you'd be good to go.

I'm not a Mac guy, but can't you run most Windows software in a Windows emulation shell on the Mac? How critical is it to have an actual Windows OS? I am also not familiar with whether the Mac hardware is indistinguishable from Windows hardware. If there are any differences, it seems like replacing the Mac OS with Windows could open up problems it might not be necessary to deal with (like finding Windows drivers for Mac hardware).

If the MBP is working, I would mess with as little as possible to allow you to run the software you want. However, if your objective is to use the MBP as an inexpensive learning lab to see what you can do, and you don't care whether you accidentally crap up a working computer, that's a different story.

 

[mitt d]

You can extract the key from the old HDD, but in all likelihood, it is for the OEM version of Windows that was pre-installed on the laptop and it won't be transferable to the other computer. If you try to use it, you will probably find that the Windows installation stops working after 30 days. If the Toshiba motherboard was still good and could be transplanted into the Macbook and you could swap the disk drives, you'd be good to go.

I'm not a Mac guy, but can't you run most Windows software in a Windows emulation shell on the Mac? How critical is it to have an actual Windows OS? I am also not familiar with whether the Mac hardware is indistinguishable from Windows hardware. If there are any differences, it seems like replacing the Mac OS with Windows could open up problems it might not be necessary to deal with (like finding Windows drivers for Mac hardware).

If the MBP is working, I would mess with as little as possible to allow you to run the software you want. However, if your objective is to use the MBP as an inexpensive learning lab to see what you can do, and you don't care whether you accidentally crap up a working computer, that's a different story.

Thanks for the reply Fixer1234,

Ive done some research on installing windows OS on a mac and it seems relatively straight forward with the help of the bootcamp utility. I was more wondering if the product key could be extracted from the toshiba machine and used to active a new install of windows on the mbp. However i believe you have answered this by saying it will be the OEM version.

Thank you for your reply,

Mitchell

 

[patcooke]

Produkey from nirsoft will find the key for you on the installed drive - download here:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

 

[whs]

The product key won't do you any good. OEM keys are not transferrable. Your cheapest Windows option is a Windows 7 OEM for $99 (sometimes on sale for $89 at Newegg). Else it would be Linux.

 

[mitt d]

Thank you for the replies, I have decided to purchase a new install of Windows 7. I live in New Zealand and have found a site selling Win 7 pro and Win 7 ultimate (for $40 more). Is Ultimate worth the extra money in your opinion? They are both time unlimited product keys, not oem.

 

[Sonny]

The only major difference is Win 7 Ultimate you have bitlocker. If you don't use it then I would go with the pro version.

 

[whs]

In all these years, I never felt the need for the extra functions in Ultimate. Here is a detailed comparison that might be helpful.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/14422-compare-windows-7-editions.html