refurbished laptop problems

hi hope someone can help me,i recently bought a refurbished toshiba laptop that had been upgraded from vista to 10 and i swapped the hard-drive with an old one (which did not work)when i swapped them back i have no operating system?anyone have idea how to restore please?Toshiba Satellite pro L300D 15.4" Laptop Athlon 64 x2 @ 2.1 GHz 2Gb RAM 320Gb HD Win10 (was vista)

If it was running Vista then it's more than ten years old. Nearly fifteen years. Pretty old. Too old to run Windows 10.

If it's an old Toshiba that's even worse.

If it only has 2 GB of RAM it wouldn't even run Vista adequately, never mind Windows 10.

You need a new laptop. Either that or load Windows XP on this laptop. It should be okay running XP.

I had the same problem ... but I had only one laptop, not 120 of them! It was a Dell 1505.

RickC said:

At the time it was released 13 years ago your Tosh SatPro L300D struggled to run Vista efficiently with its default 2GB RAM.
(I know them very well... we bought 120 of them for kids in care, and I was the lucky one that got to prep them all. The first thing I did - after showing my bosses their poor performance - was to add another 2GB SODIMM.)

It was slower than molasses. And it could not go beyond 2 GB RAM, as was typical at the time.

Manufacturers were hurrying into production for Vista, but continued to sell using designs meant for XP.
That meant 2 GB and not a bit more. That was slightly responsible for the hate directed at Vista.

Loading XP made that laptop work quite well. I continued to use it on the road until it died in 2016.

margrave55 said:

I had the same problem ... but I had only one laptop, not 120 of them! It was a Dell 1505.

It was slower than molasses. And it could not go beyond 2 GB RAM, as was typical at the time.

Manufacturers were hurrying into production for Vista, but continued to sell using designs meant for XP.
That meant 2 GB and not a bit more. That was slightly responsible for the hate directed at Vista.

Loading XP made that laptop work quite well. I continued to use it on the road until it died in 2016.

I/We were lucky. The first batch of SatPro L300s came with 2 SODIMM slots each populated with a 1GB SODIMM. Our supplier suggested we wait for a month and I was provided with a single first batch laptop to build the image. That's how I was able to show how slow it was to my senior who had recommended them (based on price, not experience). He authorised junking the 2 x 1GB SODIMMs and their replacement with 2 x 2GB SODIMMs.

The second batch came with 2 SODIMM slots, one of which was populated with a 2GB SODIMM, which made it easy to upgrade to 4GB by adding another SODIMM. However, its mainboard was very fussy about which third-party memory it worked with. We ended up buying a box of Toshiba 2GB SODIMMs at a ridiculous price. That was the last time we bought Toshiba laptops.

We reverted to HP ProBooks then, later, Dells when the reliability of the ProBooks dropped below acceptable levels. After provisioning thousands of HP and Dell laptops over the years - 40-50 at a time - I still prefer Dell business laptops over HP business laptops... and would never buy a consumer model.

(It was the most enjoyable time of my working life in IT - building corporate laptop and desktop images from a VL install base then handing them over for peer review, then - with the desktops - rolling them out locally office by office over a weekend, hundreds at a time. When we eventually handed imaging over to our hardware supplier I got the opportunity to see how they imaged not dozens but hundreds of laptops and desktops in a single session, all automated. It was amazing.)