3rd Party Software

Hi there

I have had a HP Compaq Presario laptop now for a year running Windows Vista Home Basic Version. I am wanting to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional but it is not allowing the upgrade as I have to upgrade to Vista Home Premium first. I have a legal upgrade copy of Vista Home Premium as well as a legal copy of Windows 7 Professional. For some weird reason it is also not allowing the upgrade to Home Premium advising me to do a clean install. The reason I don’t want to do this is because I don’t want to lose the bundled software that originally came with the Home Basic version (Cyberlink/ Power2Go/ DVD Suite/ YouCam etc). I have a Recovery partition on my system as well as 2 backup recovery discs I created when I first purchased the laptop. I am prepared to do a clean install of Windows 7 Professional but only if I can find some way to extract the 3rd party software originally installed (mentioned above) so that I can install it once Windows 7 is up and running. Does anyone know of a way to do this? The recovery partition does not have recognisable setup files for these programs. Please help with any advice you may have.

Thanks
gary

 

All HP laptops ship with a SWSetup folder located in C:. This folder should contain the installation files for the pre-installed software. Look into that folder and see if the installation files are present for the software you want to use. and make a backup copy of the folder and then reformat/reinstall the OS. Also, before doing the upgrade make sure you have burnt a set of recovery discs, just in case you want to get back to factory state.

 

I'm wanting to do a clean install of Windows 7 Home Premium from Vista Home Premium, so will this advice still hold true? I burned recovery disks in case I should need to go back to the factory state (which is highly doubtful) but would like to reinstall the other 3rd party software.

This almost seems too easy and HP Customer Service says there is no way to do this (I know - they're full of it)

I just don't want to kill my laptop for a couple of days trying to upgrade to Win7.

 

Yeah, it should. I have done this before WinXP -> Vista. The SWSetup folder contains crypt names(abbreviated version) for each of the pre-installed software and as long as you can figure out which installation folder works for the software you want then it should work. Any software which works in Vista should for the most part be Win 7 compatible as well.

Drivers for the hardware should be available for download from HP's website. I would only use the ones located in the SWsetup folder as a last resort.