Hi all,

Just took advantage of a student offer (am I allowed to give the link for others to do the same?) and got Win7 Home Premium 32bit for about £40.
I currently have Win Vista Home Premium 32bit, so I'm hoping that things go well. I got a digital download installation file which I'm assuming I can just double click and run later tonight and it will all go smootly (and also plumped for the CD to be mailed to me as like an extra backup precaution.)

Now, lets say worst case senario happens, my current fail safe method is to do a factory reset using the recovery partition which is built into the laptop (I have a C:, a D:, and I assume the recovery partition is the 11.17GB EISA Configureation partition I can't do anything with). I'm just wondering if I have to do this, if I will run into problems restoring a Win7 OS back to a Win Vista Pre SP1 OS? And if I do, will the product key I have for Win7 still work etc? I've never installed an OS before, you see.

Since it's a digital download .exe file, I have no sorts of documentation, which I'm hoping comes with the CD soon. I am assuming that like software such as MS Office Suite, I get 3 liscenses, which means I can install WIn7 on any 3 different machines?

Also, as an aside, is there anywhere I can go to find out anyone's Win7 horror stories, so that I can look out for software issues and avoid them for now, until they're fixed?

Thanks for any help in advance guys/gals.

I think for "worst case" you should do 2 things:

1. Burn the recovery DVD's from the recovery partition. The little booklet that came with your PC should tell you how.
2. Take an image of your current Vista to an external device. Here are a few free programs for that purpose: http://www.winvistaclub.com/d75.html

From my Users/Downloads folder, I double clicked the file I downloaded from the website,'DLMWin7HP32UK.exe', and selected to have it unpack on the Desktop. This went through the process of unpacking the file, when it reached the end I selected to Run the file. This brought up a new progress bar with ''Unloading the box'' above it. Once this finished, I have been brought to the main screen.

I do want to still be able to restore back to the factory settings Vista OS is problems arise. Should I choose Clean Install or Upgrade?

WOW. I guess I better do an Upgrade then. I think I did find some recovery disks recently for this laptop, if I find them again I'll respond again and ask for more help, but for now that recovery partition is my fail safe plan, it's what I've always used when something's gone wrong.

Now... will my stuff stay where it is by choosing the upgrade option, I've heard something about things getting lumped together in a windows.old folder.

I suppose this is like when the old family PC would do a 'non destructive recovery', it would lump the old hardrive into a 'My Last Disk Structure' folder in C:/. And I just realised that I guess it doesn't matter if everything gets stuffed into a 'windows.old' folder, since I've already done a backup by simply moving important files off to an external hardrive.