Reinstalling W10 on old Lenovo all in one.

One of my friends has an old Lenovo all in one pc which originally had W7 home and was later upgraded to W10 via the free Microsoft offer. It still has the W7 label with the product key on the rear. Unfortunately, the 500Gb HDD is showing signs of impending failure and as he doesn't have anything vital on the pc, a simple change to a better hard drive with a clean install would be best. My 1Tb Seagate which came with my laptop has only 44 hours on it despite being 6 years old as I replaced it with a Samsung SSD shortly after buying it. The drive got used as a backup in an external case, but is surplace to requirements. I suspect that the drive in the pc is a 3.5, but I have an adaptor frame for the 2.5 if necessary.
To save the bother of starting with W7, I would like to use a new ISO of W10 for the install, but am unsure of the product key needed for the W10. I,m sure the fix is easy, please advise.

Since that machine was already upgraded to Windows 10 previously, you should need no key. It should activate with a digital license.

Changing the HD has no negative effect upon being able to re-activate a new installation.

See these tutorials on the topic:

Activate Windows 10

Check Activation of Windows 10

I suspected that the activation might be easy, only requiring connecting to the internet. Thanks. Now all I have to do is figure how the thing comes to bits.

tinmar49 said:

I suspected that the activation might be easy, only requiring connecting to the internet. Thanks. Now all I have to do is figure how the thing comes to bits.

. One other note: I noticed that you were considering replacing the drive with a 2.5" drive, even if the original is a 3.5" drive. If the system does indeed have a 3.5" drive, my suggestion would be to also replace it with a 3.5" as 3.5" drives generally have better performance. The one exception would be replacing the original drive with an SSD. That can make a huge difference on a system.

EDIT: Just looked at SSD prices and it looks like prices continue to come down. A 1TB drive can be easily found in the $60 (US) range now.

I did think of the speed difference, although I believe the existing drive is only 5400rpm. The drive I have will cost nothing, to get a fairly slow system going again, the owner was going to scrap it. The PC must be quite old, it lacks USB3 ports and has a pentium twin core processor, apparantly using a socket 1155, and 4Gb ram

tinmar49 said:

I did think of the speed difference, although I believe the existing drive is only 5400rpm. The drive I have will cost nothing, to get a fairly slow system going again, the owner was going to scrap it. The PC must be quite old, it lacks USB3 ports and has a pentium twin core processor, apparantly using a socket 1155, and 4Gb ram

I'm glancing over at a laptop of about that vintage right now. I replaced the HD with an SSD and, while the system is no speed demon, it made a very significant difference. But understand "free". That's speaking my language

Not out of the woods yet, unfortunately, today I removed the drive which is a Seagate 500Gb and 7200rpm. I put it in the caddy in my pc and used the Windows tools to check it, plus Crystal disk info and it seemed good. I let windows scan for bad sectors and none were reported. I decided to use the disc with a fresh install of W10 home 64 and first formatted it, and for good measure, also made it one partition anf formatted it using Mini Tool Partition Wizard. Three attempts using a DVD made last week failed with the error code 0x80070017, and then decided to try the install from a USB stick. That was when I found that this Lenovo Idea Centre B320 does not have USB3 and that the boot options are limited to HDD or optical. As a last resort, I have downloaded and burned a fresh W10 and it is going ok so far. I will keep you posted with the good or bad news.

Lenovo has a video on their web site saying that you can boot from USB. However, they make it a point tht you need to first connect a bootable USB device to the system first, then go into the BIOS and set the boot order. If you don't connect the device first, you may not get an option to boot from USB in the BIOS.

I found that this Lenovo Idea Centre B320 does not have USB3

Lenovo has USB3.0 Driver for Microsoft Windows 7 (32bit, 64bit) - IdeaCentre B320

presumably the machine has usb3 ports ? Maybe that was an optional extra on the h61 chipset.

USB3.0 Driver for Microsoft Windows 7 (32bit, 64bit) - IdeaCentre B320 - Lenovo Support GB

Pretty sure you could replace the pentium with a 2nd gen i3 or i5 which cost pennies now.

i3-2100 is the gigantic cost of 10 pence. Or you could be wildly extravagant and invest in the i5-2400 for £4
https://uk.webuy.com/product-detail?...ed0&position=1

performs considerably better than the pentium
UserBenchmark: Intel Core i3-2100 vs Pentium G620