W 10 Pro - Downgrade to W 7 Pro - Alone in the dark

[Just]

Hello !

A few days ago, our family get yet another laptop, which was sold refurbished to us, bundled with a Windows 10 Pro "OEM" refurbish license. No recovery disk from the OEM (here HP) came with the machine. Windows 10 was pre-installed on the SSD, still to be customised and activated. We did it with the help of the license key written on the W10 Certificate Of Authenticity affixed by the refurbisher on the laptop. It worked like a charm.

The laptop is three years old and went out of the HP warranty in August '17. It came from another country of the UE, according to its German keyboard layout. We received an additional 12 months warranty from the refurbisher. As far as I can say, no part got exchanged or removed from the initial configuration, not even the Samsung SSD, which has been wiped but looks like an original HP part, according to the labels on it. The laptop was originally equipped by HP with Windows 7 pro, as a second CAO for an OEM license, located under the battery, confirms it.

What would be our course of actions in case we would want to downgrade the OS from the existing Windows 10 Pro to Windows 7 Pro, in accordance with the downgrade rights granted by the W10 Pro license ?

• Where may we grab an ISO image of Windows 7 Pro ? The refurbisher does not have one, the Microsoft webpage for downloading Windows 7 ISO images rejects all my attempts, as our license is "OEM", not "retail", and no original recovery disk was given to us (ordering a new one from HP is barely an option, due to its high cost);
• After having eventually installed a fresh Windows 7 Pro on the laptop, which license key should we use in order to activate it ? Might we use the original W7 Pro license key written on the COA under the battery ? Should we phone to a Microsoft call-center to get an activation code for our newly installed Windows 7 Pro ? Which phone number to call then ?

Thank you all for your advices and guidance.

 

[xilolee]

Hi Just. :wave:

I had an HP machine until two/three months ago (and partially, I still have it!).
It came without COA and without windows installation disc.
But it had a hidden recovery partition (with Win8 in it, the original installed OS) and the HP software to bring the OS to its factory settings/install.
You can check if you have the same partition and verify if it contains 10 or 7.
I doubt it is still present, but who knows...

I'm not sure the Win7 COA could still work.
I think you can obtain better answers directly from Microsoft support: https://support.microsoft.com/pl-pl/contactus/
A chat is present and I used it to know how I could do with my (previous) license, if I could have used it to activate my half-new machine.

 

[SleepyDude]

Hi,

You can download the Windows 7 Pro directly from Microsoft by using this tool Windows ISO Downloader after installing Windows 7 Pro if it doesn't accept the key you can try contacting the Microsoft activation phone line or let me know, I will try to help you activating the machine with the key you have.