Hi All,

Recently my older Acer Aspire 5570-2792 notebook hard drive failed on me. It's about 3 1/2 yrs old. Was running Vista Home.
I of course like an ***** never burned the recovery media from the hard drive. And it's just my luck that Acer no longer has the recovery media available. They told me there was nothing they could do for me and directed me to Microsoft.

My question is this: I have Windows Vista home running on my Desktop. If I smack in a new hard drive in the notebook, can I use the recovery media from the Desktop to reinstall the OS on the notebook? If not, do I have any other options? I guess I could always run Ubuntu.

I know this is an older notebook, not necessarily worth a lot but I'd like to keep this running for my wife. She uses it primarily for web surfing and she's hogging my laptop like crazy every since her's died.

Thanks in advance,

Frank

You can't legally used your Desktop's recovery media on your laptop (also because usually manufacturer's build such medium for a particular piece of hardware, with all drivers etc. pre-installed).

I think you can either choose to run Ubuntu or you can get one of those cheap OEM windows media from e.g. newegg. However, one draw back of this is, I believe you can't get any help from Microsoft directly, if you ever need it.

You may be able to use an OEM Vista disk with the key from your laptop.
If not, Ubuntu is a very good alternative.

Thanks all... It's seems the OEM Vista Media is a little pricey..so I'm gonna order a new hard drive from Newegg (unless someone knows a cheaper place to get one) and run Ubuntu instead.

You might be able to borrow one, which is what I had in mind.
Still, Ubuntu is very good and will satisfy most people's needs.