Question about system recovery back to factory shipped state

[steveox152]

I am attempting to restore my 3 year old HP desktop back to factory condition. My question is my computer shipped with vista and I later upgraded to windows 7. Will recovering the computer to original factory condition roll me back to vista and delete windows 7?

Thank You

 

[gregrocker]

There's a good chance Recovery will not run from it's partition after upgrading to Win7 so if you want the bloated factory install you'd then need the Recovery Disks which you made when you set up Vista or order from HP: HP Recover Windows 7 Operating System Using HP Recovery - HP Customer Care (United States - English)

Then you'd need to run an inferior in-place Upgrade from Vista which is a lot of trouble to restore the worst load of factory bloatware in the industry.

However if you have a Win7 Upgrade DVD you can use it to Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 to get a superior install of just the OS without the sponsored crapware and useless HP utilities which have much better versions built into Win7. Everything you need is in the blue link.

 

[steveox152]

I would like to do a clean install but my upgrade disk is from hp so im afraid it comes with all of the bloatware. Is that the case?

 

[gregrocker]

Use the latest official installer for your licensed version provided in Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.

 

[steveox152]

So this will still work with my product key on my upgrade disk?

 

[gregrocker]

Did you read Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7?

As long as you use the same version it's best to use the latest official installer with SP1 to save hours of updating after install.

If you were given a Win7 Upgrade kit from Vista, it should already include a clean-copy Win7 Installation DVD but it likely doesn't have SP1 so I'd use the latest. The version for most of those was OEM so it's tied to the same mobo but can be clean reinstalled as often as you wish.