Hi thanks for your ideas and input. Here are the latest developments and the options I seem to be down to. The SNID was no longer legible on the sticker on the bottom of the laptop and was not located under the battery and of course not in the BIOS. So I called Acer and gave them the SN and he was thankfully able to give me the SNID. He also told me that the laptop was originally sold with Linux on it instead of Windows. Since Acer does not have any recovery media avaialble I called their 3rd party outsourced company for parts etc called Grand Tech as a shot in the dark just to see if somehow they had a Windows disc that might somehow work. They only sell parts not reinstall disc anyway. I went to the link you posted and searched the SNID and it said "Recovery media is no longer available for the serial number you entered". Even if recovery media were available it would likely be Linux anyway. Obviously someone, likely a computer store, installed windows 7 on the laptop to make it easier to sell than with Linux on it so the product key might be a corporate key from a store that uses the same key for all its installs.