Want to use original OEM COA on a refurbished laptop

[gorlaw]

I have a refurbished laptop with two Windows 7 COAs. There is a "refurbished" COA for Windows 7 x64 Home Premium and the OEM COA for Windows 7 x64 Professional. Both are visible.

The refurbished COA was activated when I purchased the laptop and has a digital entitlement for Windows 10. The OEM COA was not activated when I bought the laptop.

After upgrading to Windows 10, I found that some of my critical software has compatibility issues and I need to revert to Windows 7 until these are resolved.

Question: I see no issue reverting to the Windows 7 with the refurbished COA product key. The question I have is will the OEM product still work if I decide to go with that instead?

I understand that there is no digital entitlement to upgrade to Windows 10 from the OEM Windows 7, but that isn't relevant for me right now.

Thanks and looking forward to your response.

 

[slowhands95128]

I see you want to revert to Win 7 Home, or maybe use your OEM key to go Pro. No problem. As I understand it, you have 30 days from install date of Win 10 to revert. You'll have Windows 7 Home, though.

If you want to change Windows editions to Windows Pro, use a Windows 7 Pro ISO DVD or USB drive and use your Pro OEM key for a fresh install. How do you get a Win7 ISO? You can't use the Microsoft Windows 7 ISO download, because they don't allow OEM keys to let you download (which totally sucks, Microsoft --- You can install and activate with your OEM key, just not use the MS site for ISO download.) Since you have a legitimate Pro OEM key, you can buy a "backup" all edition ISO disk for Windows 7 SP1 for $5 on ebay, and they work fine. Or you can download Windows 7 ISO any edition from another source, like

http://mirror.corenoc.de/digitalrivercontent.net/

You'll need QTorrent for this, but it's doable. Once you have the ISO, burn to DVD or write to USB drive.

After installation, when you activate it may go fine if there have been no activations on that OEM key. If there have been some, or if Microsoft is having a bad hair day, you may have to use phone activation. You should get activated either way. I hope that gives you some useful options.

 

[gorlaw]

Thanks for your answer. My inclination is to do a clean install using Windows 7 Pro. I have an OEM installation disk. Just need drivers.