When i purchased this computer it had windows home premium. About a year later it died from a trojan horse, my son had a friend of his fix it for me but evendently he installed home basic instead of home premium. Now I have a black screen
and a message that says the copy of windows is not valid. When i try to use the activation key on the bottom of my computer it says it is not valid. I believe this may have something to do with why I cannot do alot of my school work.
Back up all important files, emails, etc. to an external storage device before doing anything else to the operating system
As long as the friend did not delete the restore partition on the computer you should be able to restore it back to factory specifications by following the instructions you received with the computer (possibly F11 key-press upon boot-up
or some other key combination.) Once restored to factory specifications you should be able to install the proper updates to your Vista OS (up to SP2), install a decent anti-malware program (free is Microsoft Security Essentials) and your backup of files
that you saved prior to the restore of the computer.
If the friend did dump the restore partition then you need to go to the manufacturer's web site and see if they can supply you with a set of restore media for your computer. Otherwise you will have to find an exact duplicate of
the original install media to use the product key on the computer.
