Solved Install (reinstall) windows 8 on OEM laptop

[Micik]

Hello to all,

this is my first post on this forum and I hope you'll be able to help me or at least give some usable advice.
I have a Samsung laptop bought in best buy store in the US a few years ago. The latop cam with installed windows 8 and without any installation CD. At that time I was told that it is OEM version and that it is OK.
I have used the laptop without any problems for a few years with constant Windows update. I didn't choose to update to win 10 because I was afraid that the laptop would become slower with newer OS.
Anyway during the years the laptop has become rather slow with a lot of so called "bloat ware". It still works OK but recently I had even problems with ransomware. Luckily for me there was no damage because I make regular backups. Now I feel it's the time to format the HDD and reinstall windows but of course the problem is that I don't have installation CD. There is also no sticker label on the case.
Now there are software tools to extract the windows key and I can download win 8 from the internet, but I'm not sure if that is the right way to do it.

In the properties of "My Computer", I can even find out the last four letter of my Win 8 key. I have also inspected the laptop and there is no a hidden partition for recovery. So what should I do?
What would be the best steps to take?
I'm pretty much sure that fresh new installation of windows will make my laptop faster.
When I open Microsoft web page, it is suggested to download windows 8.1 but not if I should do that.
Access Denied

Attached, please find the basic info about my computer.

Thank you very much in advance.

 

[samuria]

Welcome to the forum. The key thing is to make a disk image of the current disk to some other device so if anything goes wrong you can role back. Windows 10 would be quicker and more advanced but without knowing your system specs its hard to say.

You could upgrade to ten it should still work and see how it goes if it works and your happy you could then do a cleana install of 10.
You could install 8 or better 8.1 as long as you have an image and a bootable recovery disk for the image you safe

 

[Micik]

Hello and thank you for the reply.
My specs are listed in the attached pic. The laptop has 6 GB RAM and 500 GB HDD. As I said I don't have any installation CDs because the laptop is bought with already installed windows 8. Also from official Microsoft page it is possible to download 8.1 and not windows 8. I know there is a problem regarding using win 8 product key to install 8.1 from scratch.
I gues win 10 is out of question since I don't want to pay another license for the OS.

However, I went to system storage in administrative tools and found out that I have more than just two partitions which are shown in My Computer. Two of them are called Recovery. So I searched the internet and found that there is a restore/recovery software that is normally installed with Samsung laptops and I actually found it in my program files (it didn't show up in the Start->Programs list).

So I can use restore after all and it is true after all that all Laptop computer bought in BestBuy stores come with the possibility to restore/recover original installation.

I also have one more newer laptop bought in the BestBuy and it has a partition that is visible in windows called Recovery.
The Samsung laptop has partitions that are hidden from windows but this Restore/Recovery manager can see it.

Thanks anyway

 

[samuria]

Once done upgrade to 8.1 as it's more secure etc. Lots of members are reporting the win10 upgrade for free is still working so it's worth considering but you need 8.1 once you have restored you will have lots of updates