Backup and restore files onto Windows 7?

I recently purchased Windows 7 Professional. I went with professional instead of home premium because both were $30 (student discount) and I thought a clean install of windows (current version: vista home premium) shouldn't be too hard.

I decided to partition my hard drive however, to dual boot vista and windows 7. The reason I did this was to make sure I got everything restored onto the Windows 7 partition before deleting vista.

But, I just found out that Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore isn't available on Vista Home Premium, which I find absurd. Does anyone know how I can go about restoring all my files onto Windows 7? Am I stuck doing everything manually?

Assuming you have already installed Windows 7 onto one partition and Vista is on another and you want to restore your personal files to the Windows 7 partition, then yes--restore them manually. Typically by drag and drop or send or whatever your normally use.

If you are not talking about personal files, that is another question.

Well I was hoping to restore all my program files instead of downloading each one again on Windows 7. I have already tried manually doing this, but there have been problems. Not sure why...could be caused by incompatibilities or missing files. I thought that if I had done a complete PC restore, I could get all my programs working on windows 7

You can't drag installed programs across partitions from one OS to another and have them work properly.

Personal files you can.

If you had done an upgrade install of Win 7 onto the same partition as Vista, most or all of your programs would have worked.

But you didn't do that. As it is, you have to reinstall your programs in Windows 7 when booted into that OS.

Decide if you want to retain a dual boot--that you want to maintain a Vista operating system on your PC

If you don't, you can get rid of Vista and its partition, maybe with some difficulty.

Obviously, drag your personal files to the Win 7 partition before you do that.