Question About Upgrading From Vista to Seven

Just want to ask for a little advice from the experts before I do this please.
I have an older Gateway with Intel Duo Core CPU 1.86 GHz; 4 GB of ram, currently running Vista Home Premium 32 bit. The MB is limited to 32 bit. It has a 360 GB SATA hard drive that is about half full, as well I have a 1TB SATA hard drive that I have never installed.
I would like to upgrade it to Windows 7 similar to what I run on an HP Laptop that is about a year and a half old. I have seen Windows 8 and I am not too crazy about it.
I also have loaded Office 2007 full version, as well as various other misc programs. I don't do any gaming. I do plenty of Excel stuff, Word, and Powerpoint, internet, email, etc.
I know I should back up all my files before I start any kind of upgrade.

I ran the W7 upgrade advisor a couple of days ago.
It came up with a couple of incompatibilities, mostly printer drivers that I don't use anymore anyway; and a couple of recommended upgrades; nothing that's a show stopper.

Is there a nice slick seamless way to upgrade to W7 that avoids having to re-install everything afterwards? Or am I faced with wiping the hard drive and starting clean?
Any advice or tips is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
rstew

Others could tell you more, but I would wiper clean ...

Probably best to make an image of your Vista installation - this is a great freebie to use:

Free Download AOMEI Backupper Standard: Windows Backup & Cloning Software

Then try the upgrade.

If it goes well, great.

Otherwise, install win 7 clean and fish out what you need from the aomei image after.

OK thanks for the advice.
The aomei backup sounds like a great idea.
Does it make an image right on the current C drive?

I am wondering if I should copy all my files (except system and programs) from the C drive to the 1 TB D drive. Then if the W7 install does not go well on the old C drive, I could install it on the D drive, and swap drives. Then re-install the other programs needed and I should be good to go. Does this sound like a good idea?

thanks,
rstew

One other question; is there a site where I can download a licensed version of w7 x32 bit?
Or do I need to pick up the CD at the local computer shop?
The Windows upgrade site seems to have only W8.1 available, unless I am looking in the wrong place.

Thanks,
rstew

Ok thanks to all for the advice.
It sounds like the clean install is the way to go. I'll have to block off a day to do this I guess.
One other question; Vista 32 bit only recognizes 3.24 GB of ram for some reason. Will W7 32 bit recognize a full 4Gb?

Thanks,
rstew

rstew said:

One other question; Vista 32 bit only recognizes 3.24 GB of ram for some reason. Will W7 32 bit recognize a full 4Gb?

Thanks,
rstew

The missing .76GB is being allocated to other devices on your system, mostly the graphics card. It will be the same in Win 7.

There is an issue with 32-bit Windows in not properly recognizing or using more than about 3.5GB of RAM. A number of pages here speak to that:
https://www.google.com/search?noj=1&....0._1h0jEMaM-w

Berton said:

There is an issue with 32-bit Windows in not properly recognizing or using more than about 3.5GB of RAM. A number of pages here speak to that:
https://www.google.com/search?noj=1&....0._1h0jEMaM-w

Other devices that require memory address space reserve it during boot. It's primarily onboard graphics adapters that do this, reducing the 4GB maximum available for other uses. There is no issue with using 4GB in 32 bit Windows of any flavour.