Friday, October 21, 2016

Historical tech post: Installing Windows fresh on a new laptop (05 Jan 2013)

I bought a new Samsung notebook PC. Overall, it works well. It came with Windows 8 64-bit, not Windows 8 Pro, but it was one of those Christmas day deals and I have the Windows media anyway. I found out that computers arrive these days without OS media, and with a restoration partition so that Windows can be re-installed if necessary. However, with separate installation media, I had the option of reformatting the whole drive and wiping out the space taken by the restoration data, which includes a bunch of manufacturer applications which I'll probably never use. Note that before I did this, I downloaded the manufacturer drivers from their support site.
 The installation of Windows 8 is slightly different than previous versions, so my process was to boot from the DVD, which required a BIOS change to allow this, so check your manufacturer documentation. I did indeed choose the advanced options to delete and recreate a single installation partition. No license key was requested because on a PC that originally has Windows pre-installed, a key is built into the BIOS. After installing the manufacturer drivers, Control Panel can be used to Add Features to Windows, where the Pro key is requested for certain features. Including a few environment tweaks, this all took a few hours, but I encountered no errors and the hardware works as expected.

No comments:

Post a Comment