Upgrading from Vista to Win7 w/ Clean Install & Using HP Recovery Disks

I want to upgrade my HP DV7 from Vista to Windows 7, but in everything I've been reading, it's best to do a clean install. While I am tech savvy enough to do a clean install, I am uncertain about what I might need off of the HP recovery disks I burned when I got my computer. Is there a way to select what you want to reinstall from the recovery disks or do I even need to bother with them?

I purchased my own copy of Microsoft Office and have the program available to reinstall. Most of the other programs I have on the computer I believe I either have the disks or can download again, but again, not exactly sure what is on those recovery disks that I "might" need.

Am I better off taking my laptop in to Geek Squad to have them do the clean install and recovery disks? I'm certainly capable of installing MS Office and my printer, etc., but am just leary of doing the OS install myself.

Suggestions but not techno heavy please????

 

The HP Recovery disks are probably for reinstalling Windows Vista, so if you are installing Windows 7, you may not need them - again, having a little trouble understanding. Just backup all your data, and install Windows 7 as a clean install - let's the computer have a clean slate and start from scratch.

If you are in need of more help, or don't quite understand my answer, just post back, and either me, or other forum members will help.

 

As mentioned above, a clean install will not need the recovery disks, since they are to restore your system back to original state.

Make sure that you collect all available W7 drivers for your model first in case W7 doesn't find them all. And it is best that you let Windows 7 download and update the drivers.

One word of advice, a clean installation might cause issues with some of the HP special applications. You might end up either losing some of them or will have a hard time to get them running as before.

 

Hi.

Running the Upgrade Advisor will help determine any issues you might encounter, so you can take steps to be prepared after installing Windows to solve them, like downloading a particular driver for instance.

 

One of the main issues you will likely encounter is the loss of the ability to recover quickly from the HP recovery partitition. The recovery partition will still have Vista and it will only allow you to recover back to Vista (if you want/need to recover from that partition). Not only that, you will likely end up with a dual-boot machine (Vista/W7). I have performed a clean install on my Samsung laptop and have the problem I am referring to above. I have been trying to put a copy of Windows7 on the recovery partition for weeks but have not been successful so far. You have to decide if this matters to you or not but I find the HP recovery partition to work very well (I have an HP DV4 in addition to the Samsung and have used the HP recovery partition to recover my C drive completely). Note that the HP recovery partition also includes all the HP specific drivers and S/W.