Have Vista key, but no Vista disc...

dulpit

Hey,so the laptop I use every day originally had Vista on it, I nuked it and replaced it with the Windows 7 Beta, and then the RC. Now I am aware that the RC will be expiring in March, so I went looking for the Vista disc that came with my laptop. And couldn't find it. Anywhere.

I have a license for Vista Home Premium (well there's a sticker on the bottom of my laptop with the key) but I dunno how i'll be able to install it...

I had a quick snoop about the interwebs, and the consensus seems to be to request a recovery disc from the manufacturer. I bought the laptop (it's an Acer) in Singapore, so I don't know if Acer will be able to help me.


So my question:

Is there a way to install Windows Vista back onto my laptop using the key I have already???

Karoma

You can probably find a clean OEM Vista torrent (i.e. no keys, serials, etc.) but it's still dodgy as hell + you'll need to download drivers for your laptop.
My first question would be: are you sure the laptop came with a recovery disc? A lot of modern laptops come with recovery partitions (i.e. the manufacturer has a part of the hard disk drive hidden and configured to reinstall the OS+ software.) Check the manual.

DarrenMSP

I wouldn't go the torrents route as it illegal and you don't know what you are getting.

Ask some of your friends, someone you know must have bought a Vista pc and have a disk with the OS lying around on it.

Then wipe, install and use your product key when asked for it.

As Karoma says, it is more likey you have a recovery partition on the computer. Right click on computer and select manage > Storage > Disk Management to see do you have any hidden drives.

Capt'n Midnight

Borrow a vista disk, someone posted agood while back on how to get it to be recognised as different versions.

downloading is V. Dodgy as likely to be trojans / keyloggers in there somewhere