Windows 8.1 OEM FREE

Just something I went though and thought I might as well share it to save you some pain if you plan to go through it.As you know Windows 10 is not actually FREE if you have to buy it. Its pretty expensive actually from the leaked pricing. The best way to secure it is to get hold of the upgrade NOW by pre-booking.

BUT in order to quality, putting the license issue aside, you better be on Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1 U1. Yes, nothing below is going to work. The pre-booking “app” is actually a Windows Update component which will not install on anything lower.

So, for those stuck in Windows 7 or 8.0, maybe it’s time to upgrade.

Windows 8.1 is kinda a SOB cos of the license key and all. Its not compatible with the keys used for 8.0 and such. But what I am going to share is a secret to get whole of the legitimate keys, right in front of you on that bloody machine of yours. A lot of people did not know this. When you buy a Dell, HP and what not, OEM machine, they actually implanted a CD Key into your BIOS. And its always activated automatically based on that key. Its usable for Windows 7-8.1. Meaning if you bought it a few years ago with Windows 7, you are supposed to get Windows 8 and 8.1 upgrade FREE. Looks like your school admins did not do their job :P

But nevertheless, I will tell you how to get it right. Pretty much without their help.

You will need to download the media to install Windows 8.1.

NOT, not from some torrent or fileshare site! But right from Microsoft, perfectly legit.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-SG/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media

It’s a few GB of download, but ONLY this version works (out of the ISO) for OEM products. There are other ways to get it to work by changing the ISO or branding it, that’s pretty complex and I won’t discuss it here (Although the 26-in-1 OEM ISO is pretty exciting, with all the Asus wallpaper and all).

While download that, you should EXTRACT your OEM CD-KEY. 3 ways to do it, but I cut the chase and show you the easiest one.

https://github.com/christian-korneck/get_win8key#files

Run the EXE and you better be sure to print it out, especially if you plan to wipe you HDD.

Now, you have all you need to “upgrade”. By Upgrading, Its far too glorified a term to use. I assure you 90% you will fail. But be my guest and try to upgrade your Windows 8.0 to 8.1. Its due to the amount of software and shit that had been in there since 8.0 was installed that cause a lot of complication to just upgrade. In the end, I guess most of us choose to REINSTALL 8.1.

I won’t say it’s a bad choice, but it’s definitely clean. Now, the important point is during the installation right from the start, you will see the CD-KEY prompt and you will be able to fully verified with the one you had extracted. It doesn’t matter if you bought your Acer with Windows 7 or Windows 8 at all. It’s a perfectly legit copy of Windows 8.1 in your hands now and nobody just want to talk about it.

Well, you may or may not need to activate it, more often than not, yes. But if you do not want to use an online account (which gives you Sky Drive Pro, which could sync your personnel settings onto the cloud. This however is flagged by Mcafee Webwasher as “Uploading to Skydrive” though  DOOH!), you should unplug you network during the installation and you will be given a choice to create a local account for Windows 8.1.

Let me know if you find this useful.  

Remove the Hidden Partition

Don't you always hate it when your laptop or PC comes with a recovery partition which you may not actually need anymore because you had upgrade your OS or not? Well, you will also find that inside Windows (normally) you will not be able to remove this partition safely. Well, the worry is over because under the administrator command prompt there is a way to do so.

1. Open a command prompt as administrator.
2. Run Diskpart application by typing Diskpart in the command prompt.
3. In the “Diskpart” prompt, enter rescan command and press Enter key to re-scan all partitions, volumes and drives available.
4. Then type in list disk and press Enter key to show all hard disk drive available.
5. Select the disk that contains the partition you want to remove. Normally, with just 1 hard disk, it will be disk 0. So the command will be:
   select disk 0
   Finish by Enter key.
6. Type list partition and press Enter key to show all available and created partition in the disk selected.
7. Select the partition that wanted to be deleted by using the following command, followed by Enter key:
   select partition x
   where x is the number of the EISA based recovery partition to be removed and unlocked its space. Be careful with the number of this partition, as wrong number may get data wipes off.
8. Finally, type in delete partition override and press Enter key.

Once the partition has been deleted, exit from Diskpart, and now users can use the much familiar and much easier Disk Management tool in Windows (diskmgmt.msc) to manipulate the freed unallocated partition. Users can create a new volume (partition) with this space, or simply merge it to existing partition by extending the size of the existing partition.