Thanks everyone.
Still on the subject of W7. Because I've never formatted my HDD before, can anyone point to a resource that gives an complete idiots step-by-step guide on how to format your drive which currently has Vista Home premuim on it.
Thanks!
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp
That one looks alright, though it is a bit silly about the booting for the CD part, step 3. It is also for XP, but you'll find Vista and W7 significantly easier that this, and you can use your mouse for navigation.
The easiest way to find out if your computer is set to boot from an optical disc is instead just to find it in and see what happens. However, if i doesn't boot from the disc then most likely the BIOS has just been set to boot from a hard drive first, then from other devices after that (and since the hard drive contains a working version of windows, that boots)
If it doesn't boot from the CD first time then hit del, or f1 etc (it will say press f1 to enter setup or something similar just after you turn the computer on) And then just use the arrow keys to move through the bios, looking for something to the effect of 'boot device priority' Which just lists what the computer should boot from first, set the CD/DVD drive to the top and then save changes and exit. Note, you can mess things up from within the BIOS but unless you do something extreme it is likely to be reversable (a bit fiddly, but you wont need to buy new components), and also changes will only be applied when you save and exit, so dont be scared of pressing the wrong button, just put it back if you change the wrong thing.
Oh, and you can speed up you boot time a little by setting the hard drive back to the first position when everything is installed because instead of "anyone there, nope, anyone there, nope, oh hello mr hard drive, i'll boot from you now" you just get "hi hard drive, lets go"
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