Finding my way around Windows 7 Ultimate

[News]

Greetings people, and Happy Christmas!

Not expecting a quick reply - doubtless you're all hanging up a stocking on your wall, and hoping that the snow will start to fall ...

Anyway, my PC, which I bought 19.11.06 is running XP, with which I am reasonably comfortable. Have just inherited son's castoff, which is a Compaq Presario CQ5223UK Desktop PC, running W7 Ultimate, although the label on the box says W7 Home Premium. This PC is stuffed full of crap. Games, utilities, God knows what. I know he has played with various operating systems, Windows and Linux, and I would like to reset it, back to factory fresh condition, and start again. I know I could delete stuff via Control Panel, but that takes forever and tends to leave stuff in the registry and elsewhere.

Needless to say the PC was supplied without any disks, which should be created at home, but weren't. There should be a drive on the PC with factory reset option, but it isn't there - or at least, I cannot see it, so son may or may not have deleted it.

My question is, how can I be sure that I am seeing everything on the hard drive? I know just enough about W7 to know that each user only sees what he is authorised to see. What I don't know is how to ensure that the account I'm using can see everything, or how to create an account that does see everything.

Does that make sense?

[polygonum]

Very often you have a boot-time option - press some key immediately power is applied - and you can choose to restore to factory settings. Key to hit varies - Esc, F1, F10, ...

That assumes the original hidden partition is in fact there and is viable for re-installing Windows.

This will lose W7 Ultimate unless you can re-download and install the upgrade - check about license keys, etc., before you do this!

[Geoff Pearson]

Use Magic Jelly Bean to find the Windows 7 key and download the system from Digital River. Then start again.

[Nick]

In message , Geoff Pearson writes

You don't say how you looked at the disc, but you can see everything on it from disk management: Click Start, search for diskmgmt.msc and run it. If there's no recovery partition in that, it's gone. If search doesn't find it or the program won't run, it's likely your user is restricted. You could (if you can see it), right-click and run as administrator but if it asks for a password that you don't know and can't get from your son, then Geoff's path will cause less hair loss.

[Mark]

The official M$ Win 7 is no longer available from Digital River :(

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[News]

Thanks, all, for the advice. Yes, I could, and will probably have to, start again. I have an installation CD for W7, from another PC. Assuming I use that, but use the key from the original PC (Jelly Bean), will that work?

Then begins the fun. Finding, downloading and installing about a million drivers, which I was hoping to avoid. Just being lazy, really.

[Geoff Pearson]

I think i it is: I downloaded and installed Home Premium this week. Maybe Ultimate is gone?

[Geoff Pearson]

[EricP]

All versions are still available as usual. Just downloaded two.

[Bill]

In message , Geoff Pearson writes

My experiences with a Thinkpad laptop might be of interest to the OP. I have been asking about this in several places, but basically not making much progress. When I bought the machine it had some bad sectors, so I wanted to transfer to a new HD. As far as I can tell, the machine was originally sold with a factory pre-activated Vista, with a Vista COA on the bottom. Making recovery disks by the manufacturer's method blew away the recovery partition. Very early in its life it took advantage of a Lenovo scheme to upgrade (important - not a fresh install) to Win7 64-bit. This was by another pre-activated set of media, and again Lenovo's disk making recovery software blows away the recovery partition.. So we have a Vista COA, and a pre-activated Win7 install with no recovery partition and the original owner has lost any recovery media he made.

I used Belarc Advisor (better than Magic Jelly Bean ime) to recover the key, and tried an installation using a Digital River image, but it would not accept the pre-activated key.

I have only managed, with great difficulty, to make a satisfactory image of the flawed OS and load that onto the new HD. Lenovo have Rescue and Recovery software that looks as if it might help with repairing individual Windows files, but this informs me that it will not install on a Win7 that has been upgraded.

The OS is usable in its new home, but several things don't work. In my spare moments I'm gradually working through these as I find them, but really I would like to be able to rebuild Windows from the Digital River image and not lose the existing activation.

I've just posted this to demonstrate how one can get bogged down in this whole registration/activation process

[Brian Gaff]

Yes, and I'd imagine one has to be in the original admin account that installed it to do all this.If you can get in as admin, then why not use revo uninstaller on the stuff you do not want, and then do some registry cleaning with eusing free registry cleaner. Then you can do all the usual defrag stuff and upgrades and see how it goes. If it all works, then why worry, if it don't then restore as has been mentioned, but I doubt you will have the ultimate version, might run win 8 and there is a test util to see if it can. Most of mine can't. Brian

[polygonum]

No - restore from manufacturer's special partition does not need any account information.

[Mark]

No you are right the links to Digital River are working again, they were not at the beginning of the year i thought they had removed them for good.

you can install any version or edition of Windows 7, Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional to Ultimate edition. by editing the downloaded ISO and removing file named ei.cfg and then burning the ISO to DVD you will need the correct product key for whichever one you choose.

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[Stephen]

DONT use Magic Jelly Bean... It is infected with malware!

[Nick]

In message , Stephen writes

Don't know about MJB, but I've used Belarc Advisor to retrieve keys:

[Davidm]

Nirsoft have a huge range of Windows utilities, and this one:

displays product keys. A trustworthy source.

[Geoff Pearson]

Are you sure - I've used it successfully with no sign of badness? What malware does it carry?

[Geoff Pearson]

I like Belarc more - but for some things it does too much - when I just want to be able to print a summary of product codes.

[Davidm]

Also, take a look at Windows System Control Centre:

Brings all the SysInternals and Nirsoft utilities all together in one GUI interface.

[Stephen]

I used it on two Win 7 Ultimate machines.

I had legitimate keys but did not know which key was for which PC.

Both has anti virus installed. Both detected malware when I:

(a) visited the website offering Magic jelly Bean. So I used a Live Linux CD (Knoppix) on a diskless 3rd machine machine to download and save onto a CD-R the Magic Jelly Bean software from the malware riddled website.

and

(b) going back to the Win 7 machines, with said CD, decompressing and installing the executable, rebooting the machine, the AV software upon startup detected around 3 pieces of distinct malware on both machines. The AV products on both machines removed the infection which also entailed removing Magic jelly Bean.

I don't recall the malware names. but I do recall they were key loggers so your usernames and passwords were being reported back to a internet machine.

For my own security, i wiped both win 7 machines clean and reinstalled and changed all my banking usernames and passwords.

I've not had any consequent damage thankfully.