Standard Reinstall Procedure?

[shanenin]

I am starting to get nervous about that start of my repair business. If all goes well I will be getting calls in february. I am assuming a large part of my business will be reinstalling windows, and alot of those will be XP.

Assuming customers no longer have a recovery partiton, or recovery cds, It gets little tougher. Is it pretty standard in the industry to use an oem xp disk, along with the key located on their computer to do clean installs? If I own xp home oem(sp1 and sp2) and xp pro oem(sp1 and sp2) will I be able to reinstall most xp computers(minus some drivers). Any input would be appreciated

Also many computers have proprietary software bundled with there original install. When you guys fix computers like this, do you tell the customers, without disks, there are out of luck? Or do you send a way for model specific recovery cds? That leads to a final question. lots of computers come with microsfot works. Could I buy an oem "microsoft works" cd, and use the key that is on their computer, finding it with a program like belarc advisor?

I would appreciate any thoughts or suggestions :-)

[naraku9333]

The OEM cd may work, I have a XP disk that came with my girlfriends laptop that installs fine on any computer. I believe some are specific to the manufacturer, try installing it on another system (if you have one).

Tell the client before hand that without recovery cd's or partition you cant reinstall all there software. If you can make a list of phone numbers to various manufacturers for clients to call and get the disks may be a good idea (I dont think they will send you the disk not being the owner). How many people acctually use all the crap that come on PC's anyway?

[blim]

Now, someone jump in and correct me if I'm wrong here!!!!! You all know I won't mind a bit

With the MSWorks question-----After we reinstalled Windows98 on the Possessed Gateway, we wanted to install Microsoft Works 95 (I know, but I was afraid a newer version would overtax the old goat, and I think it works faster than the newer version we have)

ANYWAYS, during the install, it wanted a key code and we didn't have it. *whoops!* I didn't think to "fetch" it before the installation. I called Microsoft with my dilemma and was given a "generic key code" to get it installed. I would think this generic code would work on any computer.....

AND I wonder if MSWorks "key code" is in the registry, like the operating system's code??? If you have a truly busted computer, Belarc might not work, but you might find the code in the registry, IF it lives there, that is!

Liz

[shanenin]

Thanks for the insight :-)