Win 7 clean reinstall without bloatware for Toshiba OEM laptop

I'd like to do the following and would really appreciate some help and advice. I have a nearly five year old Toshiba L500-1XD laptop which came with Win 7 64-bit home premium. It's slowed down considerably and is my secondary PC now so I'd like to do a clean reinstall and give to my daughter.

I have the Toshiba recovery disk but don't want to reinstall from it as I don't want any of the bloatware that came with the laptop.

I've grabbed the ISO file from this Digitalriver mirror [assume moderator has removed the link], written down my OEM product key and created the bootable usb drive. But the more I read about it the more I'm worried that since it's an OEM install, Microsoft won't let me activate it in the end.

Can anyone advise if the best course of action is to go ahead, reinstall from Toshiba recovery disk and live with bloatware or just leave things as they are.

Many thanks

You have two choices:

1. Use the .ISO you grabbed and install following this:
Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7

2. Install from the Toshiba Recovery Disks, then follow this to clean up bloatware:
Clean Up Factory Bloatware

If I was you, I would choose option 2 since you can't be sure how clean that downloaded .ISO is. Option 2 will allow you to clean up the bloatware to a high degree.

Another consideration, if you can locate a genuine .ISO, say from a friend, then you could perform Option 1 and activate using the product key on the COA sticker (explained in the OEM tutorial above). The source of the installation .ISO isn't critical, its the product key that is. You can indeed activate an OEM installation, having clean installed it - that has happened here thousands of times without issues :)

Tricky question that. If it was me, and I couldn't borrow a genuine ISO to do an OEM install, personally I would go for Option 2. I absolutely have to to trust the source of the .ISO, even beyond the MD5 and SHA. Thats just me though.

The key on the COA is definately the one to use - both for vanilla and SP1. The key that MJB reports is the mass key that is used in the factory when they install the images to the systems - don't try use that, it won't work.

No, you can only install the same version as stated on the COA sticker - so if yours says Home Premium, then you will only be able to activate a Home Premium installation with the key from that COA sticker. You can install either x86 (32 bit) or x64 (64 bit).