New laptop

[finncapt]

My father in law wishes to purchase a new win 10 laptop.

The thing comes with much bloatware which he will not need.

I, having looked on the net, think the best course of action, before anything else, would be to format the drive and install win 10 from an usb iso.

If I have read it correctly, MS will know that it has had win 10 previously installed and will allow me to do this.

Any comments welcome.

Thanks.

[le Pingouin]

I've successfully reinstalled Win10 over the top of an upgraded (OEM Win7 to Win10) laptop but haven't installed over the top of an existing Win10 OEM installation.

You'll need to use the right version and also the correct language, at least that's what I've found.

[Loose rivets]

BLOODY MS. Win something. Upgraded free to 10. Fine for ages.

Want to sell the computer - still almost unused in the box - so do a 10 reset.

Seems okay, but now it's asking me for a key. Hologram has no key - it's a Lenovo so you'll get sweet F-all out of them. I should say, I got sweet etc.

Been all through this with Asus and MS MS sold me W8.1 for $45 as a compromise. Became a thing of the past.

Upgraded everything I could find to 10 while still free. Mostly okay. But have no idea what to do about the Lenovo except to enter it via my MS account which gets me in. Not really saleable so not at all what the W10 promotion had me believe to make me 'upgrade'.

[Philoctetes]

Alternatively, just go to Programs and Features in Control Panel and manually delete unwanted installed junk.

[anchorhold]

I have a Dell laptop, had to replace the hard drive, but could not reload windows 10, could not do it as I didn't have the password as Dell never provided it. Phoned Dell they wanted about £300 to provide me with a new copy of windows 10.

I discovered that the passord is embeded on the laptop, so I paid a technician about £20 to extract the password.

On that basis, I would remove the programs individually rather than trying to reload Windows 10, for the reason given above.

[FullOppositeRudder]

The thing comes with much bloatware which he will not need.My most recent Dell W10 laptop arrived with McAfee Av installed, along with the other things which Dell thinks we need - including MS Office 365.

I removed McAfee (not easy, but I looked through the Goggle suggestions first), installed Avast and Classic Shell, and a previous version of MS Office. It has been a functional and satisfactory machine ever since. I subsequently removed the MS Office 365 suite after the warranty had expired. This was tricky, but I triumphed after a bit of perseverance.

I would be most reluctant to format the HDD of a brand new computer - especially a laptop - and expect a re-installation of the OS and the supporting software to be plain sailing. It may well turn out so to be, but I wouldn't go there. I also suggest that any warranty for the machine could be voided by such an action.

FWIW
FOR