Clean install, new HD, from upgrade disk

greg you sound like an expert so, at the risk of really embarassing myself, what do you think about this...

I just got a new (blank) internal HD (WD Caviar Green) because Vista was running terribly on my PC. I only have the Vista upgrade disk, so I couldnt install Vista onto the new blank HD...

However, what I did was install the "trial" version of Vista (from the Vista upgrade disk) onto the new blank HD by NOT entering the product key. Once I got that done, I then installed full Vista, again from the same Vista upgrade disk, from within the trial Vista that was now acting as my desktop OS. After doing the "full" install, over the "trial" install on the same HD partition, I went in and deleted "Windows.old" folder. Then I activated the full Vista.

So, long story short, I now have what I think is a "clean" (or cleanish) install of full Vista on my new HD on a 50GB partition (30GB of partition is used).

Honestly, I am not OS install/reinstall savvy by any stretch of the imagination, but whatever I did (above) seems to have worked (and by the way, Vista now performing about 1,000,000,000,000,000x better than it ever did ont he previous HD).

So...with W7, can one do the same thing with a blank HD, i.e., use the W7 "upgrade" disk to install a trial version, then install the full version over the trial version, and activate?

I am expecting my W7 64bit upgrade disk on Friday (Vista really caused me permanent psychological damage) so I am trying to figure out the best way to replace my (new) Vista install with W7.

I hate to say this but MS seems to make this whole process fairly confusing.

Well the simplest way would be to start your upgrade disk from the Vista installation and select Upgrade and let it do all the work reinstalling programs, settings and files. Then test drive the installation to see if it has all of the snappiness and speed that Win7 should provide over Vista. This is what I would do, however I now have a year's experience Beta testing Win7 so I have something to compare it with.

Once you get your Windows 7 upgrade completed, be sure to use the great new feature that lets you create an Image backup which you should safeguard externally. This is your ticket to never having to do a reinstall of the Vista OR Win7 upgrade since you can simply reimage your HDD (or a new one if it fails) in 20 minutes or so with the image backup. In fact, you can keep you external plugged in to automatically back up important files and make an Image update as often as you want, in the background when the computer is idle or wake it up from sleep on a schedule.

Finally, you still have the ability to do a clean install with your Win7 upgrade disk over the Vista if you think you wil get better performance by comparison. For this reason you might want to also use Acronis or other imaging software to image your Vista and save it before doing the Upgrade. For a clean install you select Custom (instead of Update) and then install it over the Vista, to another formatted primary partition or even to another formatted Primary HDD (which is how I am doing my XP/RC upgrades). All of your files are placed in a windows.old file for redistribution, but you still have to reinstall all of your programs and settings which is why I recommend you try the Upgrade choice first.