Dell Laptop - If I Reinstall Win 10 Will My Code Still Be Valid From The Free Upgrade

Just over a year ago i bought a second hand Dell 5749 Inspiron Laptop, it originally was purchased with windows 8 but the previous owner did the free upgrade to windows 10.

I dont like win 10 and so i totally formatted the hard drive and lost all the Dell formatting and the recovery partition or whatever was on the hard drive. I installed my own copy of windows 7. I never took to the chiclet keyboard on this laptop and so i bought an old Thinkpad T520 and now i need to sell the Dell laptop.

I need to prepare the Dell laptop for selling and so i have a few questions.

1 - Is is better to have windows 10 on my laptop, would this make it easier to sell?

2 - I believe the windows serial is injected into the motherboard, so in theory if i install win 8 it should be automatically validated, is this correct?

3 - As it originally had windows 8, can install win 10, would the serial be valid if i installed win 10 from a windows 10 iso or is windows 8 my only option?

4 - Is there an easy way to format the hard drive back to the way it was when it was new? So its all back to normal for the potential buyer. Or should i just do a normal install from an iso and do an iso backup and give this to the buyer on a bootable memory stick?

 

I reckon the key is consumed by Win 10 during upgrade. So, you're stuck with W10.

 

IIRC correctly, it will activate successfully once connected to the internet - when upgraded in the past, a hardware ID/fingerprint was sent to MS that they should be able to match to allow the authentication.


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1) Yes Windows 10 will automatically be activated as the laptop's hardware was registered with Microsoft even if you don't enter a product key during installation. It will be activated the moment you go online

2) To find out your Windows 10 Product key so you can use it to activate Windows:


Download RWEverything and launch it as admin


Click on ACCESS > ACPI Tables


Then go to the MSDM Tab:

 

Many thanks for the replies guys. I installed windows 10 and sure enough it is validated when you look under System. This is good news as i think it will make my laptop easier to sell if it has windows 10 on it.

@Phoenix thanks for the link to show the serial for windows, i think i would prefer a to have the serial to type in manually but that is progress for you.

Thanks again guys