Windows 7 laptop question

with windows 7 being just over a week away, and me being impatient, I would very much like to try it on my laptop ... my laptop is running VISTA Home premium right now and I'm sure it will run windows 7 with no problems ... since this laptop was one of those preinstalled with vista laptops, there is a partition on the hard drive that holds all the recovery stuff ... I have the Windows7RC and I am wondering the following ... if I were to do a clean install of windows7 on the partition of the harddrive that is running vista, and leave the other partition alone that has recovery files for vista, would that work ... and in the event if I want to return to vista all I have to do is boot the sucker up and hit F11 or whatever the F key is to put the laptop back to the way it was when I first got it ... I am planning on putting windows7 on this laptop and of course I will completely wipe out the harddrive and the partition with the vista recovery files .... but, right now I'm like a kid in a candy store and I can't wait to see how windows 7 will run on the laptop ... I have windows7 installed right now on a pc that I use for testing and it runs like a dream .... go ahead and have a good laugh, I installed windows7 on a P4 3.0, 1 gig of ram desktop pc, and I can't believe how fast it runs ... it is running faster than XP on the same machine ... I have 2 hard drives one with XP and the other Windows7 and the difference in speed in amazing ....
if someone could please advise me the laptop question I would really appreciate it ....

Go buy another hard drive that you need anyway for cloning purposes;) Cause I rather certain you can install it on the same partition.

Or take valium;)

I think your plan will work fine. There isn't much risk in any case, if you are sure you want to go to Win 7, any computer that runs Vista will run Win 7 at least as well, and probably better.

Steve R Jones ...you lost me on your reply .... I don't have any need for a cloning hard drive right now, and I do have plenty of spare hard drives if I do wish to clone anything .... and I just may need something stronger than valium after reading your reply

SuperSparks THANKYOU .... I thought what I wanted to do would work, but I wanted confirmation from someone with knowledge .... vista has never really given me any issues that couldn't be resolved ... there is nothing of any real importance on the laptop, so its not like I'm losing anything aside from the time it would take to put it back to vista, which is no big deal .... the laptop has 4 gigs of dual channel ram right now, will windows 7 run faster than vista ???

More than likely it will.

thanks TRAIN .... I had a feeling it might .... as far as the drivers go, HP hasn't posted any windows7 drivers as of yet on their site ... I discovered when I was playing around with the test comp that if I did the install and then went to windows update site, it put all the proper drivers in .. I have vista drivers for the laptop, will they work with windows 7 or should I go to the windows update site and get the drivers from there or use the vista drivers ?????

Bet the correct drivers are in Win 7.

But if one is needed, the vista driver should work out.

Anyway, that not needed bit, is my experience when a new OS first comes out.

Yeah, don't worry about drivers, Vista ones work just fine. But there are plenty of Win7 ones around anyway - they didn't need to do any work to rewrite them this time round. This was the first beta test that I did where I was able to run all my hardware right from the outset :)

thanks again .... a friend of mine just dropped off her laptop, she wants to try windows 7 on it, so its time to get down to installing it ... will let you know how I make out ...

well the Dell laptop went just fine putting windows 7 in, I installed all the vista drivers and they worked great .... it runs so much faster ... I just ran a check on my laptop which is an HP and it says to go to the windows update site after installation to get the drivers .... since the dell laptop worked great with the vista drivers, should I install the vista drivers for my laptop or go to the windows update site and get their drivers ....

I do want to make mention that on the dell laptop once windows 7 got installed my friend took the laptop home and her printer wouldn't work with the vista drivers ... it kind of became a big deal so I told her to go back to vista, since I left the vista recovery partition intact and it wouldn't work ... I then told her to put the recovery dvd in to go back to vista and that still didn't work ... since the printer problem started off to be a big deal, she then decided she would wait until drivers became available since she liked windows 7 so much better ... is there any reason why the recovery partition or recovery dvd wouldn't work after windows 7 got installed ....