Hi Dell community,
Not sure if this should be in Windows or Dell forum, but here's the situation.
I have an old Dell laptop (about 5 years old) and I plan to give it to a family member to use. However, this laptop currently runs ridiculously slowly so I want to wipe it and give it clean.
I've spent around 20+ hours trying to find a way to do this through system recovery, but it just doesn't work (no options to set to factory, no Dell stuff installed when I go to recovery page by holding F8 I think it was), so I've decided it would make more sense to just reinstall Windows 7, and reformat the HDD during the install.
The problem here is that the laptop came with no Windows 7 install disk, and I never actually made a vanilla backup (massive oversight and ignorance on my part).
So to my question. If I reinstall using an iso image or an action back install disk, would that work? Would it prompt me for a license key I don't have? Can I retrieve my license key from the current install?
Unsure how to proceed to be honest, any help would be amazing.
Thank you.
Kind Regards,
Gary Shergill