One step up from an oem license but still a good value purchase would be a system builder edition. These are offbrand but brand new copies of windows that you can buy for cheaper than a retail disk. They're tied to your computer once you activate them, but they are quite obviously vanilla versions of windows and can be installed and activated on any one computer. That also includes virtual machines. Not long ago on a trades list there was a bunch of old software disks being given away and one of them was windows7 32bit. And sure enough it was an system builder. Problem, it was only 32bit, and I forgot to switch to 64bit, since the only thing tying windows to that machine is the key. There is nothing embedded in the disk whatsoever that can prove it was embedded to the key that was to be used. So, I ended up having two machines. A Windows 7-turned windows10 32bit machine fully activated, and an unlicensed windows10 64bit virtual machine. Both have a product key associated with them, but the 32bit machine obviously got to the end of the race first. So there's obviously nothing more to do other than a good old shell game with these config files. Sure enough, the hardware id's which obviously fake a real hardware id were in that config file, so all I had to do was a simple bate-and-switch, go into the 64bit machine's config file and exchange its id for the id associated with the licensed product key, delete the windows 10 32bit virtual machine, and now after starting it up we're fully activated on 64bit windows 10. Obviously that can't be applied to a real machine since the hardware id is actually baked into the system for good, but that does give you a good example of how the windows10 licensing is a bit more flexible. True, technically 32bit or 64bit doesn't matter when licensing, but this 64bit machine had more ram and memory to my knowledge.

I had thought you still had an activation limit on the retail versions, at least I did with microsoft office, but it's useful to know you can deactivate and still keep your license count. Will have to see if I can do that with my office2016 pro plus license, pretty sure I can, should I need to use it temporarily on a different computer or, worst comes to worst my vm gets corrupted but that's what backups are for.

But they can, otherwise you wouldn't need the phone option to activate on a new machine. Before I knew about deactivating product keys, I had to use the phone option several times with a retail edition of Windows XP after doing a complete system upgrade because the activation server wouldn't activate my Windows because it thought it was being installed on a second machine, so I had to assure them that this was the only installation of this copy of Windows.

This computer has a recovery partition. However, it's only 750 MB with 216 MB used. I don't know if this is going to work. How do I boot into Recovery? I'll also have to use Be My Eyes to help me out. Hopefully the folks at the Disability answer desk can help.

I'm not buying a Windows license. I thought it would let me install a fresh copy of Windows 7 and then activate with the OEM key that came with the machine. If I get this back to the stock configuration, I'll try doing an in place upgrade to 10 and see if the license carries over.

How old is that system, if 750 Mb is all the recovery partition is, maybe it originally came with Windows XP on it.

OK, then it more than likely came with 7 or 8, probably 8 or even 8.1.

Unless those system rebuild discs can restore an already activated copy of Windows, even they may not help you, it would all depend on whether they include the activation data files, and it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't, that sounds like something Microsoft would require.

You may have no choice but to see if you can find somebody selling brand new copy of the version of Windows you are trying to activate so you can get away from that problem key.

Actually I long for the good old days before Windows XP when activation didn't exist. It just shows how greedy Moneysoft is that even with all the money they were making off of Windows despite piracy that they had to tighten their grip even further by creating this pain in the butt activation system, along with the genuine Windows program that locks you out of anything and everything Microsoft if it thinks your copy of Windows isn't genuine. What if it' gets it wrong, that's a good way to piss off a legitimate paying customer.

have I heard someone complaining about bass? *cries in the corner*... I love my dell's audio driver, in fact, put the frequency to 50, bass boost to 24, and freaking love the thing!
mine's using an i5 2520m processor, but it sounds like we're using rather similar audio drivers. as a matter of fact, even on my win10, I have reverted to high definition audio, and the first thing I did was enabling bass. LOL that hurt my feelings.
as for the laptop using win7, dell, on the latitude line, at least, appears to have stuck with windows 7 pro, they really weren't in favour of 8.1. that was kind of a failure like vista, so many companies stuck with 7 instead.
actually, if anyone knows how I can get more bass out of the drivers, besides what I've outlined above, plus virtual surround, I'd love! to know. and I'm slightly confused. so you said using the disk activated the PC, but then you said the setup with NVDA says unknown to everything? so have you managed to revert it, or at what point are you?

I don't know how people can stand to listen to anything with the base cranked all the way up. All that thump, thump, thumping just gives me a splitting headache.

Not to mention that I wouldn't want to have their hearing when they get older. Without sight, I'm very careful about my hearing. But if you want to be another Hellen Keller, that's your choice.