Help: Cleanish install/upgrade to Win 7 Enterprise 64 on a new CB45

Hey guys

Hoping for some advice here.

Been reading about a clean and bloatware-free install of Windows and quite keen to try one as described here. We have an institutional site-licence for Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit on all our machines; the downside being if we don't source the hardware from the University's official supply office we have to install it ourselves and then connect to our licence server to get it activated and authenticated. Fair enough; no worries.

So one of the guys has bought a shiny new VPC-CB45 which I, as the nominal IT support guy (being basically I know slightly more about computers than anyone else), need to install onto. It shipped with Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit; I need to upgrade to Win7 Enterprise 64. It only arrives tomorrow, so I'll get a crack at it before anyone does any fiddling and setting-up of any sort, which also means if I mess it up I can use the recovery partition to fix it without any data loss. I'm hoping to strip it down at the same time and remove the unnecessary extra stuff if I can.

Near as I can tell, there are two options:
1. I upgrade from Win 7 Home Premium and leave everything else on, bloatware etc intact. I gather since they're both 64-bit versions of the OS the upgrade should be pretty much stick the W7E64 disc in and let it go and it should all magically work, drivers and buttons and ports and camera and everything.
2. I do a clean install. Option 2 is preferable, I think - I can strip out the extraneous stuff. I don't have the drivers, though, except on the recovery partition.

My questions are:
1. Am I right, the upgrade should just work in situ with nothing much apart from the W7 Ent 64 disc, leaving everything else intact and working? If yes, this might be 1st prize.
2. Could I back up the recovery system as described for a clean Vista install here in step 2 and then use it to install all the drivers? If yes, can anyone tell me where the Win7 recovery folder is hidden?

I did a complete reinstall on an old Vaio SZ-1 running XP (someone had repartitioned it and so killed the recovery partition) some years back; although I followed all instructions for suggested driver reinstall order, I really struggled to get Bluetooth and the camera working, and the Vaio Control Center and the S1 and S2 buttons never ever worked, so I'm hoping to avoid a repeat of that with this brand new CB45.

Anyone got any ideas or advice which might be important? I'm pretty good at custom-built desktops; not a fan of re/installing the OS on a laptop.

Many thanks
-d-

 

Right, so no replies to my last post above. As it was, it didn't work as I suggested it might above.

Questions, if anyone might have some insights to help me out here - so the Vaio arrived, a lovely CB45. Shipped with W7HP64 and apparently the built-in upgrade paths do not exist to move from W7HP to W7 Enterprise, so it needs a clean install.

Anyone done a CB and can give me some guidance to get it working at full spec with all the buttons and everything running properly? I'm going to have a crack at it this afternoon using the SA/SB guide and hope for the best. I'm guessing there's no clever way to simply install Vaio Care and let it reinstall all the drivers from the recovery partition, is there?

Thanks
-d-
PS: Same guy, somehow got 2 different accounts registered here.