Vista - Can I use Vista Home Premium OEM Licence with full copy?

I have a laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium pre installed and a Recovery CD-ROM. I may be missing something but, as far as I can tell, the Restore CD never gives me the option to repair my install of Vista and only gives me the option to do a full install.

If a quick repair would fix only one or two files that are corrupt, a full reinstall is frustratingly and time consumingly unnecessary.

My questions are:
1 Can I use a CD-ROM with a full version of Vista Home Premium on it to do a Windows Repair on my OEM laptop?

2 If it asks me for a licence number, would it accept my laptop OEM licence and would this be lawful?

3 If the above answers are NO, how do I do a repair without doing a full recovery/install?

Thanks

Hi,
Probably not, as laptops generaly require proprietary drivers specific to
the system which are included in the recovery disks, but quite often are not
in generic OEM or retail disks. The system may or may not be able to load
correctly if you try this and even if it does, you may find that some
hardware functions are limited or unavailable.
A retail disk would not, but a generic OEM disk probably would, but you
would still run into the problem described in the answer to (1). Your
product key is your license to use Vista on that machine, so there is no
issue regarding icensing provided you choose the correct version.
Quite often with systems that have only recovery disks the answer is that
you don't. The manufacturer did not provide for it so you are out of luck.
Vista does not really offer a "quick repair" like this, as the installation
process is not a file overwrite like it was with XP and prior. Corrupt files
in Vista can be addressed by running sfc /scannow from an elevated command
prompt.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

"matrixmainframe" <guest@newsgroup-email.com> wrote in message
news:32c47e2ce90d10c4be6f4152588c5f96@newsgroup-gateway.com...

Hi

Can you get to a screen like this one below. (win7)

The first screen instructs me to choose a language and then install begins.

Thanks Rick, I did suspect the same but just thought I'd check.