Formatting my laptops hard drive

If you backed up your files, boot off the CD, during startup you should see a message "hit any key to boot from CD", hit any key. Follow the setup prompts. When it gets to the partition pick, delete the partition and format it again during setup.

Sounds pretty straight forward... I can do it. thanks for the help... I will post the results.
Newcomer.

Well I got ready to boot from the CD when I realized what I have is actually a Vista Upgrade CD. If I were to format the HD it would look for the base copy of Vista to upgrade to. I would have been up a creek without a paddle. I just Windows 7 Home Premium Full version on CD. If I am going to buy an operating system I might as well be more current.I have a strong suspicion that the Vista Upgrade would not give me the options to format but only to upgrade but I was not going to take any chances. Thank you so much for your input, it is much appreciated. Have a great day.

Sorry for the typo, "I just ordered online Windows 7 Home Premium Full version on CD."

Good pick, you will be better off with Win 7, but.. did you check to make sure there are Win 7 drivers for your computer?

http://www.winsupersite.com/article/product-review/how-...

Never thought of that. When I bought my laptop Windows 7 was coming out in three months. I would think I am ok.

I got my Windows 7 disks, one is 32-bit and 1 is 64-bit. If I use the 64-bit my laptop will see all of my 4gb of ram but there might be a problem with loading programs if what I have are not 64-bit programs?

right now my Vista only sees 3gb of my 4gb of RAM

If you installed 32bit, that is about right, at most you will see a bit under 3.5 gig, minus whatever your video card reserves for its use if you have a shared memory video card. Win 7 64 bit will be able to run 32 bit applications, just not quite as fast as native 64 bit applications.

Thanks my friend, I'm off to the races.

you go!

I got Windows 7 installed. It booted from the CD which I thought would give me opportunity to format the HD but it didn't, hmmmmm! I really wanted to initialize the HD to start clean. Don't know if I did anything wrong.

You need to delete the partition and then format it. When it gets to the step where it asks you which partition you want to use, select it and go to advanced options. In there you can delete the partition and create and format a new one. Note all of your old data will be gone once you do that.

^Exactly.