Formatting Laptop

[Smalls]

Hello all, I'm kinda new here but have looked around on the forums alot in the past. I recently received an older Dell Inspiron 2200 laptop from a friend and it was loaded with a ton of stuff I didn't need plus it was very slow. It appeared to not have a restore partition on the hard drive, and I didn't have the original restore disk that came with it. I did though have a windows XP disk I had purchased for a previous build and I figured I could just use the product code on the bottom of the laptop. Well as it turns out I was not able to use that code and now have a formatted laptop that I can not install XP on since the product code that came with the disk is being used. Does anyone have ideas of what I could do in order to install XP using the product code on the laptop? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Smalls

 

[MindoverMaster]

Your laptop code is OEM. You are most likely running a retail version. Those two are not compatible.

Edit: Welcome to posting on TF!

 

[Smalls]

Thank you for the response. I have some old restore disk from a Toshiba laptop. Do you think it would work if I restored using those disks?

 

[MindoverMaster]

No, a Toshiba restore disk will not work. It will get confused with all the wrong drivers and will crash.

 

[Smalls]

So is my only option purchasing another copy of XP? It's an older laptop so I really didn't want to put a whole lot of money into it.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Linux? (I'm not pro in it either)

What may be cheaper, is call up Dell and request a restore disk. It would be cheaper than buying a new XP box.

 

[joelm3103]

Agreed with MoM, you can call Dell and see if you get a restore disk as it may be cheaper than buying a new XP disk. Also Linux is very handy, you can test it out and see if you like it before you decide restoring, also it takes up less space than Windows, at least resource wise . It takes getting used to though, and not all software from Windows work on it, but there are alternatives.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Yes, you can try a Linux boot disk.

 

[Lexluethar]

Agree with MoM, you will need an OEM disk. Once that is installed the product key on the laptop will more than likely work.