Upgrade older acer aspire 5515 laptop from vista to windows 7 do able?

[Brad_25]

I would like to upgrade a 9 year old acer aspire 5515 from windows vista to windows 7 (with my windows 7 Cd from my other computer). Since everything is vista compliant I'm thinking everything should be windows 7 compliant. My plan is to put a new hard drive in the acer.

Does anyone know if the vista drivers would work with windows 7?

The acer website has the most recent drivers from 2009 for windows vista drivers. I was also wondering if maybe there's a way to put the current vista drivers from the current hard drive on to a CD or flash drive to install them manually on the new hard drive if that would be better?

If this won't work I thought maybe just clone the current hard drive and just install vista on the new hard drive.

This is just a project I was thinking of doing. I was going to give the laptop to a friend that needs one.

Is this do able? Which would you choose? cloning or windows 7 upgrade?

Thanks for all your help
Brad

 

[popatim]

The win7 from your current PC is not legally transferable to the laptop. OEM versions of windows are like that. You also cannot run the same key on two different pc's. Microsoft will eventually detect this start nagging you both with Your copy of Windows is not Genuine and want you to fork out ~$100 to buy a new copy.

As far as drivers go, run the win 7 compatability tool from Microsoft and then for any drivers it doesnt have you will need to open device manager and write down all the main components and search for win7 drivers manually. I would suggest you write down all these components anyways as many times the default windows drivers aren't very good...

 

[Brad_25]

The win7 from your current PC is not legally transferable to the laptop. OEM versions of windows are like that. You also cannot run the same key on two different pc's. Microsoft will eventually detect this start nagging you both with Your copy of Windows is not Genuine and want you to fork out ~$100 to buy a new copy.

As far as drivers go, run the win 7 compatability tool from Microsoft and then for any drivers it doesnt have you will need to open device manager and write down all the main components and search for win7 drivers manually. I would suggest you write down all these components anyways as many times the default windows drivers aren't very good...

 

[Brad_25]

I was confused what you met by OEM so I did some research.

OEM versions are preinstalled software on computers like acer, dell and others and are forever tied to the original motherboard there installed on is that correct?

Because I was a bit confused this is rather new to me. The computer with windows 7 is a computer I built 6-7 years ago with a retail version of windows 7.

I was just reading that with retail versions if I were to remove windows 7 from my current pc it could be transferable to the laptop but not on both computers at the same time.


Would there be any reason why I couldn't just clone the laptop's hard drive and transfer the clone to a new hard drive as long as all the other hardware is the same?

Thank you

 

[popatim]

OEM - yes tied to their installed motehrbd foever

Retail, install it where ever you want but only on 1 pc.

Yes, cloning works well when the motherbd is not changed. if you get a usb to sata drive adapter you can clone the laptop directly to the new drive.
Something like This or this often work quite well.