How can I tell if my Windows7 is a Vista upgrade or a fresh Windows7 installation?

Avoriaz

I can’t remember whether my Windows7 laptop was upgraded from Vista or was a fresh install. I did it 30 months ago and I can’t remember what I did.

Is there any way I can tell?




You probably don’t need to read on but how I have got here is a longish story:

I bought an Acer 8935g laptop that had been built before Windows7 was available. It was originally sold with Vista. When Acer switched to Windows7, as official Acer reseller bought a job lot of unsold Vista laptops and marketed them with Vista installed and an Acer Windows7 CD. All legal and above board with official Microsoft certs etc.

I had some initial problems and ended up caught in the middle of Acer and the Acer reseller.

I couldn’t make a Vista restore CD for some reason and I eventually reformatted the disk and installed a fresh Windows7 from the CD. I still had some hardware support problems. Acer maintained that was because it was a fresh Windows7 installation and that I should have installed Vista first and then upgraded to 7. So I bought a Vista CD, installed that and installed 7 on top. I continued to have problems, which I eventually resolved myself by downloading some drivers direct from the manufacturer’s site rather than via Acer who were less than helpful.

After a lot of messing about I was eventually satisfied.

But now, two and a half years later, I simply cannot remember whether I have a straight Windows7 installation or whether I put Vista on first.

I want to do a fresh installation sometime. I have both Vista and 7 CDs. Naturally I would prefer to just do a straight 7 install but I don’t want to end up with the same problems I had before.

How can I tell what I did?

Is there anything I can check that will give a clue?

Thanks

WilliamO

Regardless of how to tell, which is virtually impossible as the windows 7 installation would of overwritten most of the core vista dll files, log files, application files and so on, you can actually do a clean installation now using your windows 7 disk....simply because it will be windows 7 overwriting windows 7.

WilliamO

RichL74

Might be a Windows.old folder if it was an upgrade over the top. Note use of word might.