Reply 20 of 28, by Mau1wurf1977
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wrote:Microsoft themselves have the ISOs available for download from their own 'Digital River' site, and the links are pretty easy to find through a Google search. I think technically those ISOs are intended for some sort of student deal rather than public consumption, so downloading them for some other purpose might be a bit of a legal grey-area.
Over here in Australia most students (I'm on currently) purchased this version. It's an upgrade version of W7 Pro and was selling for AUD 49. You can also purchase Office Pro for AUD 99.
You can download the 32 and 64 bit media as ISO files and burn them onto discs. Deleting a certain file (ei.cfg) brings back that menu where you can choose the W7 edition (You know starter, home basic, professional and all of that).
You can also easily make a USB boot stick. Jus copy all the files onto the USB and then use the DISKPART command line tool to make the partition on the USB drive active.
I used this disk to do a clean install on my notebooks and netbooks. You will have to call Microsoft, which just takes a few minutes, but then you have a clean machine with no bloat ware.
As mentioned, burn your recovery media on day one. Every day people post in forums that they "tried Ubuntu" and want to get their windows back 🤣
Some netbooks don't give you an option to burn media (my current Acer does though, I just used a USB DVDRW), so in these cases just image or clone the HDD.
Building: I'm torn on this one. For myself it's not an issue, but for friends and family, I do recommend what parts they pick, but push them to have the store put it all together so if they are issues with the computer they can just take it back to the shop and not hassle me 🤣