OEM windows licence

[Jonathing]

I've been rocking Ubuntu for a few years now but after my PS2 finally gave up and bimbled off to the great recycling centre in the sky I'd like to use my not inconsiderably powered desktop for gaming. I'm getting frustrated with WINE's patchy support for games (basically, I can't get it to run Skyrim) so I was thinking a small windows 7 partition might solve my problems. Except I'd rather not pay for a copy of windows. I bought the PC with no OS in order to save some cash, however my laptop came with a DSG OEM windows 7 licence which I never used. I don't think I even booted into windows before I reformatted and installed some linux-y goodness. Do you see where I'm going with this? The laptop didn't come with any discs and reformatting wiped out the recovery partition, a lack of foresight on my account.
Would it be possible to download a copy of windows with questionable lineage from a popular torrent site and activate it on my desktop using the licence key from the sticker on the bottom of the laptop? Or is this now null and void as it requires the exact OEM copy that microsoft supply to dixons? In fact, would it be possible to acquire this instead? Why so may questions Jon?

 

[thnurg]

It has worked for me in the past. XP SP2 from thep*****b** using the sticker on the machine.
I was delighted to be able to use this recently to repair a broken windows system that would have required a fresh installation if I had used the manufacturers recovery system.
Your mileage may vary but I'm optimistic.

This is assuming that the sticker is for the same version of windows that you are installing.

 

[Svendo]

I may be wrong, but I think the worst case (other than a dodgy download with virus' or malware etc.) is that it doesn't work at all or can't get past entering the key, next worse is it will load but won't validate online so you only get essential security updates and no support.

 

[swee'pea99]

I'm no expert on this kind of stuff, but I'm sending this from a Dell I bought with a non-validated XP pro loaded, then registered it using the code I took off a crappy old Fushitsu Siemens I used to get a trade-in price when I was buying a new HP laptop, and it works fine. No problems at all.

 

[buddha]

AFAIK ms 'renew' licenses that haven't been used for a couple of years (someone wrote a blog about it somewhere). Well it worked for me and an old OEM XP license/sticker.
And, although I have the original OEM CD - I couldn't find it at the time, so downloaded it from a dubious source. Naughty!

 

[ColinJ]

When my hard drive fried itself, I installed a friend's copy of Win XP on the replacement drive because I couldn't find my Windows disk. I had no problems getting that working. (About 10 minutes later, I found my disk!)

I bought a USB backup drive after that, and I have just realised that it has been a couple of weeks since my last full backup so I'll do one this evening!