You can get the Windows 8.1 ISO from the Create Media Reset page on Microsoft’s website. For Windows 8.1, you are not required to provide a product key for the download. In order to download Windows 7 recovery media, you have to enter a valid product key before it will let you download the ISO file. If you don’t have the DVD or recovery drive, you can either call Microsoft and try to activate by phone or you can directly download the ISO image files from Microsoft, but you will definitely need to have the product key from the COA sticker on the computer. You shouldn’t have any problem activating Windows if you restore this way. Previously, new PCs came with an OEM DVD that allowed you to reinstall Windows, but in the last few years most PCs now have a separate recovery partition that lets you restore directly from the hard drive. If the computer came installed with an OEM version of Windows and you perform a clean install with a retail version of Windows, it also won’t activate online. If the hardware hasn’t changed too much, you can make a backup of the information that Windows uses to ensure your copy is valid and then restore it after the reinstall, which I explain below using a freeware program.
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