Spent all afternoon and night, trying to get Windows reinstalled on my old college laptop because my dad needed another pc since I'll be using his personal laptop to wfh.

1. DVD Drive is faulty, slow/faulty reads
2. I don't have product keys (they're all stores on a USB disk, I should make a backup... that I didn't bring back to their place) except for Vista and Win 8 but Win 8 key already used by another PC. I have a burned Win 7 disc
3. Apparently it had a virus which was never removed, fresh reinstall never done. It hides the DVD drives and kills the internet and makes the installers think there's only 400MB.
4. I followed some wiki that said to Mark the C drive as Active... Which fixed the issue but then I decided to do the full install from boot... Except on reboot, apparently this fcked up the MBR
5. Tried googling how to fix the MBR, eventually found some USB app that supposedly fixes it. Create a USB boot disk, not recognized
6. Finally try the DVDs and release it recognize them somewhat when booting... Win 7 one kept hanging on the load screen
7. Somehow Vista got thru and actually installed...

Now IE and Chrome both complain about HTTPS issues and how they don't support Vista...

But at least my dad now had a laptop he can use to do non-work stuff while he uses his company laptop to do work.