Windows 7 refurbished vs OEM

stromdansre

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Feb 23, 2015
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I have a customer who wants to do a clean install of Windows 7 on a refurbished machine that came with a license for "Windows 7 for ReFurb", which I assume is a specific license for refurbished computers. As far as I can tell, the system (which came from No More Rack) didn't come with a recover disk and the system doesn't seem to have a restore point to work from on the hard disk itself.

Now I have an OEM hard disk of Windows 7; can I prompt a reinstall of Windows 7 with that disk and still use the product key that came with the refurbished system or are they separate versions of Windows 7 that won't allow licenses to cross like that?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
As far as I can tell, the system (which came from No More Rack) didn't come with a recover disk and the system doesn't seem to have a restore point to work from on the hard disk itself.

Per MS licensing, when selling a system, the vendor is required to give the purchaser some means to reinstall, and a COA.

Assuming there is a valid license key with that system, the install disk you have will probably work.
 

stromdansre

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Feb 23, 2015
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Thanks; I had never seen a license marked specifically as for "for Refurb PCs", so I was concerned there was something specific about the load that's already on the machine that might conflict with the simple OEM version of Windows 7. There is a COA and Product Key on the PC like you'd expect, but no restore partition on machine and didn't come with a hard disk for reinstall. I wonder if that has something to do with the fact the machine came from Canada? I assumed that just meant it was assembled there, but maybe they're doing some shortcutting there. I don't know.