How to return the factory license of Windows after a complete cleaning and installation of Linux?

Question

Windows

Good afternoon. I have a 2014 Sony Vaio laptop with Windows preinstalled. Now there is an urgent desire to remove it to hell and install Ubuntu. The question is: will I be able to return the laptop to its original state with licensed Windows over time? I will most likely need this when selling a laptop, or I would like to try the 10th version of the system when it appears. I am also interested in whether I can find a license code from the operating system on my computer, which I can use by downloading the official image from the site. Thank you very much for the replies.

Answer 1

Make a copy of the disk, and store when you need to just restore.

Answer 2

Buy another HDD for Ubuntu, take out the native one as is and put it on the shelf until needed.

Answer 3

I had the same problem - I installed ubuntu, it turned out to be shit - the battery works 3 times less, hemorrhoids with hot keys, constant error reporting, dulls ... I have a single language version, the key is sewn into the BIOS. I called Microsoft (by the way, a very good support service) and they sent me a program by mail, with which I made a bootable USB flash drive, everything is very simple there, she downloaded and recorded the distribution kit herself. And when reinstalling, I didn’t even have to enter the key, since it is sewn into the BIOS. I do not recommend installing Ubuntu, your laptop is optimized to work with Windows.

Answer 4

OS activation on laptops usually goes through SLIC. You can check this using the SLIC Toolkit.
If everything is true, the OS is activated via SLIC - dump the activation certificate in *.XRM-MS format using the SLMGR.VBS script built into the OS. And you will need to somehow get the activation key - there are a lot of different utilities on the Internet for this - use any one to your taste.
Further, to restore the OS, install a clean distribution kit of the corresponding edition / language with the extracted key and sew in the saved certificate with the same SLMGR.VBS script. The OS must be activated.
In theory, you may not have SLIC activation, but a regular OEM one. Then it's enough just to get the key and subsequently activate the OS through Microsoft support.