then boot the usb by pressing ESC during boot
the key you need during setup for activation should be under your battery cover
btw the system beeps ALOT during the install process, this is normal (i wish it wasnt)
note: you will need to have both a recovery partition and a vista partition to reinstall (yes, it is dumb.)

i went through hell with an empty partition so heres how i went about it:
find a ux380n recovery partition (the one i found was an acronis true image, you can find a bootable iso of this)
restore that to the drive then shrink it (i used gparted in linux mint debian edition 32bit to do this)
install windows xp in the empty space
install windows vista from inside xp (for some reason vista doesnt want to install this way from recovery, likely for similar reasons that windows 10 sometimes acts funny if you have multiple drives)
you only actually have to install vista using your method of choice upto the first reboot
then recover c: drive using usb