MakeShift
Glyn, sort of related to what you are saying; I have the Win 8 upgrade purchased but I am holding off for a while to install. I thought I would wait for all of the drivers and bugs to be worked out before I attempt the change over. The PC that I bought from Best Buy a few years back came with Vista 64, but I don't believe that I have the serial numbers anywhere. At least, I have not located them. I believe that means I am going to have to install over Vista and reinstall all of my programs. I am also in the process of getting all of those serial numers organized so that I don't lose anything.
There may be easy ways to do all of this, but I am not very techy with computers. This is still a very usable machine though, Phenom X4, 8 gig ram, 500 HD.
A lot of the store-bought computers have stickers on the bottoms or back of the chassis that have the Windows Product Key on them. They are sort of green, and maybe 2 inches by 1.5 inches, approximately.
If you can find that sticker, you can re-use that product key to re-install Vista.
There are also frequently recovery partitions on many of these store-bought computers, and you may be able to boot up to a partition that will load the factory original image back onto the computer.
Just a thought,
Bob Bone.