[SOLVED] Old vista recovery partition.

Hi,
I completed upgrading my DELL notebook to Windows 7 from Vista. This was part of the W7 promo that started this summer. DELL sent me the upgrade discs. I'm wondering now since I'm using W7 is there any need for the old recovery partition? Should I delete the partition? I highly doubt I'd be returning to Vista any time soon.

Thanks

You should be able to delete the partition, if you're sure that everything is working okay. So you did an upgrade versus a clean install? I hope everything went smooth with that. If later on you decide to do a clean install, you can using your upgrade disc. A lot of people have done it with no problems at all.

If you have problems deleting the partition you can use a free app called: Partition Wizard. An ISO image to burn to a CD or CD-RW may be downloaded HERE.

Its a 33.9MB download and you can use ImgBurn (free app) to burn it. Its a bootable CD so you can delete and re-size partitions outside of Windows.

About Partition Wizard

• Partition Wizard is a Windows based partition manager. It supports both MBR and GUID partition table format running on 32/64 bits Operating System including Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server 2000/2003/2008, and Windows 7. Working as partition magic, Partition Wizard provides powerful and professional functions to manage partition including Move/Resize Partition, Copy Partition, Create Partition, Delete Partition, Format Partition, Convert File System, Hide/Unhide Partition, Explore Partition, Partition Recovery and much more.
  Partition Wizard allow home users, business users, and system administrators to easily perform partition operations safely and quickly. The Enhanced Data Protecting technology keeps your data safe even in cases of power outages or hardware failure.
• Partition Wizard is provided absolutely FREE OF CHARGE for homes and businesses.
  Partition Wizard is optimized and divided into Home, Business, Server, and Enterprise Edition.
  >>Compare Editions

Partition Wizard Bootable CD Partition Wizard Bootable CD allows user to boot computer directly into Partition Wizard to manage partitions. Features including Rebuild MBR, Partition Recovery, Move/Resize Partition, Copy Partition, Create Partition, Delete Partition, Format Partition, Convert File System, Hide/Unhide Partition, Explore Partition...





Hope this helps you out.

You may not want to return to Vista in the future. But there is a possibility you will want to restore your computer to like new settings. This restore will return your computer to factory. Once you are back to factory you can do the upgrade once again.

Another option would be to make a Disk Image of your computer and then you could use the Disk Image to restore the computer instead of the Restore Partition. If you do decide to make a Disk Image might I suggest you do it before adding any personal data. The more on the drive the larger the disk image will be. I personally have created a disk image with all my programs installed. The disk image is 7GB in size, this is already 2 DVDs without any of my personal data.

If you purchased the Retail version of Windows 7?
Lets say you decide to buy a new PC and sell the one you now have. You could return the computer you have now to Vista and install Windows 7 to the new computer.

If you purchased the OEM version of Windows 7?
You have already locked Windows 7 to the computer and cannot be moved to a different one.

Thank you very much for the replies, very helpful. These upgrade discs were sent to me from DELL and out of some anxiety I went ahead and upgraded instead of a a clean install. I've had this systems for little over two months so I hoped for a smooth transition. The only thing I needed to do prior to the upgrade was have a driver ready to be installed for the DELL wireless 1510 N internal card. Compatibility issues with the DELL WLAN utility prompted for me to uninstall it and it took out the wireless driver too.

W7 works great especially on resources. My laptop is an Inspiron 1545. Processes are down from 82-71. RAM usage is down significantly and I'm using full Aero. And finally I've gained 35 minutes of battery time.

Regards