I don't have mad IT skills, but I can kinda navigate my way around some low level issues with my home computers.

I've got yet another laptop that I was going to put through a recovery process.

It's a Dell. It started life as Win 7, as per the OEM tag. Somebody upgraded to Win 8.1, and then I bought it on ebay.

I went to the Dell website and downloaded an .iso file for 8.1, and burned it to disc. I tried to download an image (based on the service tag) for Win 7. It says no OS image available.

My assumption was that I would need to recover it back to Win 7 first, and then go through the upgrade process for 8.1.

Is that about right? Or, could I go through the recovery process to 8.1 with the .iso disc I created?

I know enough that if you do things out of order, you can wind up with a can of worms to then sort out.

Are you trying to get access to the files, or just to get a working computer?

Neither. It works. It's my stupid anal retentiveness.

You know how a typical path might be something like c, windows, user, name, etc, etc. ?

There are still fingerprints of prior owner I cannot get rid off. He named it rakoon, which I cannot even rename in regedit at the root level. And, he left a couple of files that I don't have permission to access.

So....I thought I would go through the full on recover process, like recover to C with two partitions, and have essentially a fresh machine.

I just don't know if I can go through the process with just the 8.1 iso disc I burned, or if I need to go way back to the original Win 7 load.

It took me about ten hours to fix my other laptop, trying to avoid that on this one by asking questions instead of charging ahead like a freight train...

Thanks.

Is it still working properly? And running windows 8.1? If so, you can use the built-in options to reset it back to Win 8.1 fresh.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... h-reset-pc