Upgrade vaio sr19xn to windows 7

mudderfukor

I bought a vaio sr19xn which was installed with vista and I then downgraded to XP.
After getting a stinker of a virus I had to do a recovery and I thought about upgrading to windows 7.
After recovery it went back to XP so I was wondering can you upgrade straight to windows 7 from XP or should i go back to vista (I still have the recovery discs for vista)
Would this model be compatible for Windows 7? (3Gb ram, 2.26 GHz, 160 Gb)

Apologies, I'm a bit of a luddite!

DECEiFER

No bother, it would be expected that a newer OS would require heavier specs than the last for it to run efficiently. With Windows 7, that is not the case. It'll run better than your Laptop did with Vista.

You cannot 'Upgrade' to Windows 7 from XP. You will have to do a clean install. This is the best way to do it anyhow. The only downside is that you'll have to nuke your OS drive to install it and none of your programs in XP will be preserved. You should back-up anything you wish to keep from your current OS drive beforehand (like music, pictures and videos) because those will be deleted if you're installing Windows 7 on the same drive. So, you can install Windows 7, but it won't be like using your XP recovery which is probably a drive image with lots of stuff you'd need pre-installed (and lots of stuff you don't too - Bloatware) including drivers. Windows 7 has a huge driver repository anyhow, but whatever can't be installed through Windows Update will need to be manually installed by you (obtain the necessary drivers from your manufacturer's website). Now, the good thing is, your Vista drivers will probably work on Windows 7. If your Laptop was designed to work with a 32-bit OS, and only 32-bit drivers for Vista are available from Sony for your particular model, then you should go with a 32-bit Windows 7 as some hardware in your machine may not have 64-bit drivers available for them anywhere (which would be a problem). You have 3GB of RAM, so installing a 64-bit OS is pointless unless you have a specific reason for needing it.

Hope this helps!


EDIT: If it's any comfort, I just installed Windows 7 on my old old Desktop which I handed to my mother in early 2009. It's a Pentium 4 with 2GB of DDR-400 RAM and dates back to 2005. No bother at all to it!

mudderfukor

Thanks a million! Will try that so.

DECEiFER

mudderfukor wrote: »

Thanks a million! Will try that so.

Have you done a clean install of an OS before, not including a recovery install like you have done previously? If not, you may need some small pointers. It's really not hard to do, but it's easy to get it wrong at the same time. It's not usually dangerous, it's just more hassle of having to do it again to get it right.

mudderfukor

Nope, never did it before! Am a bit of a dumbass when it comes to computers! Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks a mill!