Upgrading to Windows 7

I'm trying to help a couple of elderly neighbours upgrade their appropriately elderly systems, a Dell Inspiron 1525 and a HP CQ5011UK. The Dell is on XP, the HP on Vista.

Apart from buying new hardware, the only appropriate move I can suggest is to move to Windows 7. It probably has more life than my neighbours, so they should be OK.

If this seems like a workable solution to you, then can you tell me where I could come by the official upgrade materials? Or at least find something which is guaranteed not pirated?

I've downloaded the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor so I can see if I'm going to run into problems.

Any other suggestions welcome... well, most of them. This is the Internet after all.

You will only find Win 7 Pro OEM for sale. And they aren't cheap.
windows 7 - Newegg.com

Don't buy from ebay as most are fake.

Edit.:

"The best software is the one you know how to use"

As the computers are from old people, don't upgrade them.
- You can save their data on an external disk and do a factory recover.
- You can buy a refurbished computer (not powerful but good for internet and text editing) with win 7

Thank you for your suggestions.

I migrated to Windows 7 after using XP for years (IBM had a support agreement with Microsoft to extend the support of XP for a while). I found it very easy to make W7 look almost identical to XP, which is another reason that I'm recommending it to these elderly people.

The Dell laptop has a keyboard which supports Swedish National characters, and that may be hard to replicate, forcing me to look for a legal upgrade path.

Megahertz07 said:

Remember, Win 7 32 requires at least 1G of memory (recommend 2G).

Well, at least that's one aspect where I'm in the clear. The existing systems have 2Gb and 3Gb.

Megahertz07 said:

- You can buy a refurbished computer (not powerful but good for internet and text editing) with win 7

How would I go about buying a refurbished computer (laptop and desktop)? I have very little experience in this area.

I've only ever bought one PC in my life, when I retired from working for IBM in 2012. I'm using it to write this post.

Alejandro85 said:

My first question would be, why to suggest an upgrade ?

One system is XP, which is out of support. Something is pestering to upgrade driver's, for a charge. This sort of thing upsets people in their 80's.
The other is on Vista; I'm unsure of the support stance on that.
Both systems are quite slow (the PC equivalent of being in it's 80's), and the owners keep mentioning this.
I'm not young myself, but I've become the IT support for much of my village. If I fix one person's performance issues, I'll get inundated with similar problems. So, replacing the hardware with refurbished systems is the best solution for me, and probably for them.
I'm drawn to Windows 7 as it can be made to look the same as XP and Vista. This will reduce the amount of time I spend showing them how to do things.
It's an interesting task. I like the responses I get when showing them that the right mouse button really does have a use!