Tried installing over Primary partition

I did a quick google search and found the differences between all Win 7 products and I'm starting to see the importance of "OEM installed" OS's. Ult includes Bitlocker, so what's the importance of that? Would my troubles have anything to do with the fact that Dell doesn't support it for my machine?

No. What troubles ? I thought everything was fine now ?

Once again can you read the COA what version does it say ?

AddRAM said:

No. What troubles ? I thought everything was fine now ?

Once again can you read the COA what version does it say ?

From my first post today, "I turned my machine on today, walked away for a few minutes, came back and it was in screen saver mode(I think?). I tried moving to mouse to awake it then the space bar and finally had to hard restart. I ran chkdsk as mentioned in the event viewer and no problems were found.

My COA says "Home Prem OA". It also has a long serial under that. Can I use that to reinstall/activate Home Premium?

When I contacted Dell a few days ago, they said they're sending me a Home Premium disk to reinstall to original OS.

Yes that`s the key you use, but you might not have to use a key when you get your new disc.

I need to ask why in the world did you attempt to install Ultimate over a working Home Premium ?

AddRAM said:

Yes that`s the key you use, but you might not have to use a key when you get your new disc.

I need to ask why in the world did you attempt to install Ultimate over a working Home Premium ?

I was under the impression it was somehow better (as the name Ultimate implys) than Home Prem but, like I was leading to in a previous post, I don't think the trouble is worth any gain in my case.

It is in no way better. Unless you need to use alot of memory or speak Spanish, Hebrew, Chinese etc.

And where did you get this particular Windows 7 Ultimate may I ask ?

Did you compare the 2 and see if you needed anything Ultimate offers ?

This is why I linked you the tutorial to Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 because it has everything you need to reinstall the licensed OS which came with your Dell. There are even special notes for Dell users.

Why would you just ignore this help and recklessly install another Win7 version that you don't even own, never asking back any questions while leading us to believe you were following the steps given to clean reinstall?

The time for nonsense is over. If you want to clean reinstall your Dell then follow the steps given in the tutorial, asking back any questions to get each step done. Since your Dell Recovery partition won't work now, you can delete all partitions using the Options shown in the illustrated tutorial included in the steps.

Thanks for everyone's help! I've installed Home Pre and am liking having a stable computer again.