Question licensing Win 7 Home Premium

I just finished installing Win 7 Home Premium on a Dell E1505, so far so good. I had put in a T7200 cpu and 3 gig of RAM, seems to be working nicely.

I see OEM installs of Win 7 Home Premium available online for $55, download only. Will the activation key they send me work with the copy I installed?

I got my iso file from Digital River and just bypassed the license screen when I installed. I wanted to make sure the machine would run with Win 7 before springing for the license.

Thanks for any insight anyone can offer

 

It.. should.. work. No guarantee.

 

If the key is for the same version of Win7 as you have installed, it should work.

 

It works, I've done it many times before.

 

Just a side note....instead of T7200 I would've gone a T8100.....IMO

 

Thanks to all for your comments, will pull the trigger on one of the online offers

I was not sure what the Inspiron would support, the specs for the board suggest a max FSB of 667 and the T8100 runs at 800. I found anecdotal evidence of folks running the T7600 successfully so I focused on the 667 FSB CPUs.

I found a cpu-world comparison that suggested the T7200 would actually do better for the kind of use this laptop gets, primarily email, browsing and light document work.

It is running great on Win7HP 64 bit. My Dad is pleased that he does not have to learn a completely new look and feel (Win8) and the upgrade did not cost that much. For the OS, CPU and RAM I will be right at 100. I did get him to go with an SSD so that bumped it a bit.

Thanks for your comments, I appreciate all suggestions.

 

T7200 is socket M

T8100 is socket P.

They are not interchangeable under any circumstances.

 

Yeah that would be true..just looked up again and was hoping it would work but in this case they can't use T8100 but if they could that would do more for a E1505...but guess a M socket is what they are left with for best upgrade.

 

So the initial install on a Kingston V300 SSD (120GB) went fine. Last night I got a call from my Dad saying he had a BSOD. Rebooted and got the same error.

I had installed Win & Home Premium in trial mode, not licensed yet.

Any thoughts or suggestions on what to check out or look at?

It seems that the PC ran fine for almost a week, noew BSOD on bootup. Wondering if this is infant mortality on the drive or an update issue of some kind.

Thanks for any comments or suggestions.

 

Without knowing something more about the error message related to the BSOD, it's tough to say anything.

My first suspect would be the drive itself, but it could be a zillion other things as well...

 

Yeah the BSOD message said if a new drive had been installed, then to remove the new drive or the drivers for the new drive so it does appear to be related to the SSD.

Drive has a 3 year warranty but Kingston is closed on the weekend. Will pursue with them on Monday.

Thanks for your thoughts and any additional comments.

 

I'm not intent on starting a SSD flame-war here but...

I'd RMA the drive, get the replacement, sell it and move to another manufacturer...which one can be discussed at some point later in the game.

Good luck.

 

Thanks for your comments. I spoke with Kingston and they want me to make sure the drive is detected in the BIOS before they RMA it. In their words "it might only need Windows re-installing" Like my time is valueless.

Seems that since the BSOD happens after the Windows splash screen, the BIOS is seeing the drive, otherwise I would expect a "No Operating System detected" error instead of the BSOD. Ah well, time to have my Dad mail me his laptop so I can get to work on it.

 

So finally figured out the issue with the Inspiron BSOD. Basically user error. I forgot to change the boot sequence to move USB down the list. I had put the old HDD in a portable case and connected it to the PC via a USB hub. When Windows did an update and rebooted, the system apparently saw enough of the old OS to try to start but then choked and puked and presented a BSOD. It did this repeatedly.

When I received the laptop, I booted it and was surprised to see windows start and tell me "Installing updates". Once the updates loaded I rebooted, went into the BIOS and reset the boot sequence, pushing usb to the bottom. Rebooted the machine and got more updates, rebooted again and it is running sweet. I switched the 1 gb sodimm with a second 2GB SODIMM to get the extra quarter GB, rebooted again and all is well.

The OEM license I bought failed to activate so I had to use the automated phone system to activate Win7 but all is set now and it seems to be running fine.

Feeling foolish about not thinking to try disconnecting everything and rebooting before I had my Dad mail me the laptop but oh well. I've made worse mistakes before and no doubt will again.

Thanks for all comments and contributions