Local charity shop has a Win 7/64 Pro PC in for sale.
It has a Gen 13 i3 with 4 Gig ram, etc, so cannot be too archaic. Onboard graphics and 500G hard disk, plus DVD rewriter but no obvious branding like Dell
Problem is they are going to 'wipe the drive' before selling. I pointed out that if it has a Win7 Pro installation then it can still be upgraded to Win10 using the media creation tool (or whatever). I got the impression that they didn't realise this.
If they really do nuke the disk with Format C:, is there a chance that the product key for Win 7 Pro will still be in the Bios ?. I assume this means an 'upgrade' to Win10 Pro/64 is still possible ?.
13th gen is the current one. Maybe you mean 3rd gen (~2012)?
I imagine they want to wipe because there might be donator's data on it. Only sensible thing to do IMHO.
It may be, although I couldn't say for sure for that vintage. If it's not an OEM box (ie was a custom build by somebody) the key may never have been in BIOS in the first place.
If they haven't yet, you could ask them to run a tool that prints out the key before they wipe it.
If not a Win7 OEM key from ebay for a fiver should happily upgrade to Win10.
13th gen CPUs were only released about 6 weeks ago, that new a machine is unlikely to only have 4GB of RAM, and unlikely to come with Win7, nip back and take some photos of the make/model number etc?
The limitation is the requirement for a TPM and a CPU from the somewhat limited list that they have tested. A simple tweak will let it install anyway - it's been running on my FX8570 for many months now.
They do say that there could be problems in the future with upgrades, but I figure that a) they are probably covering their backs and b) as I save all my data to my home server, a failure that takes out my desktop machine would not be a problem (I'd still have access via one of my kids' Ryzen based machines or my Win10 laptop).
I'll get around to updating my desktop machine at some point, but there seems little point in spending hundreds of pounds now, when the FX8570 is still a perfectly capable processor.
I know. I was replying to Martin's comment that 'Win11 refuses to install on CPUs as "recent" as the venerable i7-3770' - although I mistyped FX8370 as FX8570. That's an 8 year old processor yet runs (unsupported) the latest OS.
There is MagicJellyBean or the like. Belarc Advisor (free version) is another tool.
Or the Nirsoft one, just because it pisses off Microsoft. If you download this onto a Windows 10 machine, Windows Defender will take action (calls it "hackerware"). Should be OK on a Windows 7 machine.
formatting link
The license key is 25 characters in human form.
When the license key is stored in the Registry, they used a trivial algorithm to obfuscate it. That's why you cannot search for it, using some characters from the whole string as a search term. Softwares like Produkey or MagicJellyBean, just do the inverse of the transform and print out the license key. Someone posted the algorithm years ago in a microsoft.* group :-) Which means, even if we did not have one of those softwares, we could do the conversion by hand.
That's why, if there is a COA sticker on the machine, and several digits are scratched off, searching on partial strings won't work. Only using a tool (ProduKey) will find it, because the registry locations are known, and once you get there, the encoding method is known.
The key is not encrypted, it is just encoded in the Registry. It takes fewer than 25 characters, to encode the 25 character license key.
*******
There are many different types of license keys.
1) Keys can be bogus. What that means is, the licensing is done by other means, and a "generic placeholder" key is on the machine. The generic placeholder cannot be used to do a re-install, because it isn't actually licensing the OS.
These are bogus keys. Check your own computer if you're running Windows 10 right now, and see if you have one of these. I have some 3V66T machines for example. Free Upgrades from Pro to Pro.
Windows 10 Home - YTMG3-N6DKC-DKB77-7M9GH-8HVX7
Windows 10 Home SL- BT79Q-G7N6G-PGBYW-4YWX6-6F4BT
Windows 10 Pro - VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T
Windows 10 installs done via the Free Upgrade, get those keys. These keys cannot be reused -- because they're bogus.
2) A key could be part of some VLK. Don't know the details. Enterprise IT would normally clean up the machine before release.
3) Royalty OEM (Dell pays a small royalty per unit), the key in there should be bogus. Whereas, the COA sticker on the machine, has a key which is not currently in usage. If the hard drive dies and the user has no recourse, the COA sticker key, plus a Windows 7 matching version (Pro for Pro) can be used to reinstall. My laptop is done this way. The key is real. You can JellyBean that key and reuse it. However, a lot of COA stickers are scratched and damaged, the key is not on C: right now, and you're screwed. Some laptops place the COA sticker in the laptop battery bay, to protect from scratching.
4) The owner of the machine could have purchased a separate license, then that individual may or may not have adhered the COA to the chassis. JellyBean the key and save it for later.
There is no reverse lookup for keys. There is no standalone "validator". If such tools existed, they would be used at high speed, to "find valid keys and sell them" :-) There is a utility (mgadiag) for diagnosing activation issues, and that's about as close to a validation scheme as you're going to get.
The organization selling these machines, must have some amount of experience with these upgrade chains, and recognizing how to do stuff and what is wrong when it does not work. It's simply not possible to write a post long enough, to cover off all the if-then-else of it.
The Optiplex I got, has a Microsoft Refurb kit on it, that a Chinese guy downtown installed on it. That's the official method for processing recycled lease machines. There is no COA sticker in the kit. There is a license key. There is a DVD with Windows 7 on it. I asked for the DVD for my machine, and the Chinese guy had a cupboard full of them (the DVDs he did not give to the customers). That DVD is verbatim like any other installer DVD for the country, so there is no "magical superpowers" on the DVD. So while I have the DVD if I need to reinstall, it isn't absolutely necessary. What is necessary when you get a Refurb Kit machine, is to immediately JellyBean, write it down and throw the piece of paper inside the chassis for later :-)
Boot up Linux on a Win10 box, and there's a tool you can pull that table for inspection. There, you will see your key.
The legacy method was ACPI SLIC (for OEM PCs) where a table of around 10KB or so, declared "I am a Dell" and that caused the Royalty OEM OS to activate. That is not a key, and the key showing in the BIOS in that case, will be the same key value on all similar Dell machines. Even retail motherboards, like an Asus, have a 10KB SLIC, but it is filled with noise and won't activate a thing.
There was a transition, from fitting the BIOS with a SLIC table, to fitting the BIOS with an MSDM string. A SLIC could activate at least three generations of OS (like WinXP, Vista, W7), whereas an MSDM is for only the one OS (unless a Free Upgrade is offered, which enhances the OS range). If it was not for the Free Upgrade offers, an MSDM would be a bad deal.
*******
formatting link
"To find your original Windows 10/11 product key from Linux:
Open the terminal application.
You must run the Linux command as the root user.
sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
to print Windows 10/11 or Windows 8 OEM product key.
You can also use the acpidump command to get the same information under Linux.
My Optiplex 780 is too old to do it that way, but newer machines will have an MSDM table.
And that method is not reading a Windows Registry. It is reading an ACPI table provided by the BIOS interface.
The nice thing about that modern scheme, is that in combination with the two Free Upgrade offers, that can cover as many as three OSes (W8/W10/W11).
If you had a hundred Dell Optiplex 780 in front of you, the SLIC table and the OS image would be the same on all of them.
On machines fitted with MSDM, each machine has a *different* string for the MSDM. That means the initial flash image, is different on each machine. Or, some tool is being used, just to burn a single flash segment, as a post-operation. We used to do that at work, burn a master image into flash, and as part of customization, a separate operation burned a unique identifier. This has also been done on motherboards to assign MAC addresses for NIC chips. You buy blocks of MAC addresses from IEEE, and transfer that to the hardware. I have a flasher here for an NF2 motherboard, that the burn command accepts a NIC MAC and a Firewire MAC value on the command line. A Firewire needs a MAC because at one time, Firewire supported networking (driver removed from Windows).
I'm sure some charity sources of ex company pcs seem to be able to make them windows 10. I'd have thought that it would depend very much on the tool they use. After all you only want to wipe personal data and then change the disc name. Would a hacker really buy a machine ujust to see if they can retrieve old data if some attempt has been made to erase it? Brian
The PC will be a little slow with a normal hd and only 4 gig of ram. Get an ssd and another 4 gig and it will be pretty good. As far as I know, without a hack, never will have win 11 though, sadly. It seems to me having still been running windows 7, for the most part, that 10 going out of life in 2025, is just a little like taking the piss. I'm told that Win 7 anti virus updates will stop in January, but other than that these operating systems do most of what folk need and its just certain makers who decide you need a new box, nothing to do with the os capabilities. Of course Microsoft are finally going down the new processor architecture route and when that happens reliably, and if its even half as good as what Apple are doing it will be worth doing, but while we are in Intel land I'm really not so sure. Brian
That depends on just how pathetic the attempt made to erase it was.
We wiped them twice with random data written to every sector and even that might not be quite good enough against a well resourced state actor. It would make it incredibly difficult for them though.
You have to remember that the main reason corporates dispose of PCs is that they won't run the latest and greatest corporate standard software.
If you are content to live with the previous favourite OS then they can be a *VERY* good buy. Add a bit of extra ram and you are home and dry.
It was different in the old days when CPUs got faster year by year. Now it is taking something like 5 years to get a 2x improvement for single thread speed. Most common software is single threaded.
Modern CPU's are now astonishingly fast - way more than most home users will ever need unless they are into 3D animation or something.
1) Insert Windows 10 DVD while Windows 7 is booted. Double click Setup.exe . Install. If it pesters you about account, do a Local Account, as Windows 10 has an obvious path for that.
This causes the Free Upgrade to be registered with the Microsoft License Server.
That's the only reason you are doing this install step, is to get the Free Upgrade registered with the server. This saves writing down license keys, doing key analysis (like if it was a VLK, the install would likely make a comment).
In an Administrator terminal
slmgr /dlv # Check license status - should say "Licensed" # Reboot a couple times if it isn't, in case # the license server is acting up.
2) Clean off PC, using DBAN or similar. Most computer literate people can figure out how to clean a drive properly. Even dd.exe can do it. And there is the resident "diskpart.exe" "Clean All" you can do from the DVD : Troubleshooting : Command Prompt.
3) The recipient can then insert the same Win10 DVD, boot the DVD, and do a Clean Install onto the now-wiped hard drive. Set up a local account, as that is allowed. When an MSA is needed for some reason, that's a separate step. Since the PC was registered in Step 1, the Clean Install will automatically activate, using the bootstrap resident key used during Step 1.
People do scrape machines for personal info, but it's mainly to see how outrageous the cargo is, rather than to profit from it. In Step 2, the machine hard drive will have all-zeroes on it, so no info is leaking. Erasing a small HDD takes a couple hours. Unless you do a Secure Erase and "post" the erasure. Drives remember a Secure Erase is in motion, and they will not stop the erasure until the entire surface is processed. The drive controller records what track is currently in process, so if the power goes off, the erasing will continue when the power comes back on. Secure Erase is an ATA/ATAPI command set feature, and is not available on SCSI drives. You kick off a Secure Erase, and the drive will not stop erasing until the last track is processed. Even if the power goes off multiple times.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.