[mlinc]

I have the original HP 2133 that came with Vista Home Basic pre-installed. It has the Via 1.2 Ghz processor and the 120GB hard drive. I have upgraded the memory to 2GB (with help from the guide on this site).

I purchased a retail upgrade version of Windows 7 Home Premium via the pre-sale at Best Buy.

I installed Windows 7 from the DVD upgrade disk using a LaCie external DVD drive (USB 2). The upgrade went very smoothly, but it did take about 4 1/2 hours. I imagine that was because of the speed of the HP hard drive, the speed of the external USB drive and the amount of data and software I had installed on the machine. During the upgrade I was advised to uninstall iTunes, which I did. After the upgrade I downloaded available updates from Windows Update. I re-installed iTunes after the upgrade and it is working fine. I also used the Disk Management utility in Windows to delete the Vista recovery partition that came on the HP 2133 hard drive. This freed up about 9GB on the hard drive, and I would not want to restore Vista to the machine, anyway. All of my programs and settings transferred over just fine, including my wireless network and home network setup.

So far I have been very pleased with the performance of Windows 7 on the HP 2133. I can't really say if it runs any better than Vista, but it certainly isn't any worse. If anything, the machine is not running as hot as it used to. Since I just purchased a new desktop with Windows 7, it is nice to have the same OS running on both of my primary computers.

Based on my experience I would say that it is safe to upgrade the HP 2133 to Windows 7 from Windows Home Basic. I would recommend making sure that you have 2GB of memory installed before doing so, however.

[ZBoater]

Any driver issues? I am fixing to upgrade my wife's 2133 (I just did my 2140).

[mlinc]

I did not have any issues with drivers. I ran Windows Update after the upgrade and the drivers that were downloaded with the upgrade and Windows Update seem to be working just fine.