New (old) laptop... no original disks

[signal]

This is cliche so bear with me: yesterday, my brother won a laptop in a poker game when the guy he was playing did not have enough money to cover his losses.

The laptop in question is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600. Originally, it was running Windows 98 (what the pdf manual says online), but apparently the previous owner updated it to Windows XP. So that is what it is currently running.

However, my brother desires a clean install and I began trying to help him. Since he was told from the guy he won it off that he didn t know where the install disks were, I tried to see if there were a way to reinstall windows from the hard drive (similar to the way dell comps have a small portion of the hard drive partitioned to do exactly this). No dice.

So any advice is appreciated. What are his options?

1. Purchase Windows XP disks and reinstall (costly just for an old laptop)

2. Somehow there is a way to do a clean install w/o disks...???

3. Bite the bullet and update all drivers, AV, anti-spyware, etc. and clean the comp that way, deleting all unnecessary files left by the previous owner & hope that no malware is present....


thanks for any and all replies to help.

[goldtoes]

1 - You are correct. It's probably not worth the $$ for an older laptop.

2 - By the looks of it, no. There would be a seperate partition for this. It sounds like he probably repartitioned and formatted the disk when installing XP, removing any backup partition, if there even was one. (Which I doubt if it originally had 98.)

3 - This would be the only real option in my eyes, that is...if I didn't have multiple copies of XP sitting beside me.

I might even add another option.

4 - Give the laptop back to the guy and tell him to pay real money. If he were to win he would expect to be paid in $$. This is the 21st century. We do not barter. And he shouldn't be gambling with money he doesn't have. Would recommend not playing with him again, and setting up a payment plan instead of him just grabbing some worthless POS and handing it to your brother.

Good luck.

[BiPolar_Nut]

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4 - Give the laptop back to the guy and tell him to pay real money.

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winnar

Thinking out loud: You could google for a utility that could recover/decipher the product key, copy it down, then order a replacement media w/o a license for ~$5 and use that to reinstall.

Drawbacks are: The product key must match the windows version...and I don't mean 2k/XP or home/pro...I mean retail/OEM/volume. Retail product keys don't work on OEM discs, etc. Another unknown is I have absolutely no clue weather the "retrieve product key" utilities actually return a usable key. I've run them on several OEM-installed Dells and they never matched the product key on the windows license sticker on the case. This may be a dell thing since surely they install from images.

Thoughts/contributions from others in this area would be appreciated. In theory it should work, and would be useful information in the future....but I'm only putting it out there as a theory. YMMV.

[goldtoes]

BiPolar, I use a free program called MS Key Viewer and it does produce a valid key.

But I am not using a manufacturer copy of XP.

[signal]

Thanks for the help guys.

Awhile back I had to use one of these product key retrieval applications & it did work for me... I can't believe I forgot about this. I will look into these options too.

As far as the objections to the unethical way of settling a gambling debt by the first bloke... My brother didn't object since he currently uses a decent desktop and he just wanted a laptop for internet usage so he could be mobile around the house. I told him he should've just taken money and look into buying a used laptop at a later time, but he said, "What's done is done," and I don't know how well he knows the guy (or if the guy is shady).

But, thanks again for the advice; as always, it is greatly appreciated. (ps. goldtoes, if you recall I was the one that you gave some advice to on the full tilt sound problem & you might find it amusing that I found a quasi-solution: I simply use windows media player to stream music before I start a session et voila no problems. Even though it aint elegant it is pragmatic!)

[goldtoes]

[ QUOTE ]
(ps. goldtoes, if you recall I was the one that you gave some advice to on the full tilt sound problem & you might find it amusing that I found a quasi-solution: I simply use windows media player to stream music before I start a session et voila no problems. Even though it aint elegant it is pragmatic!)

[/ QUOTE ]

wow...extremely strange. glad you got it working though!