The way to do this that has the fewest hassles is to go to Dell.com support and enter the service tag number. Request an OEM OS recovery disk. Should arrive in a couple of days. Install it. If it turns out the original OS wasn’t Win7 as you were led to believe, you can upgrade with the Win7 disks you have, assuming it is legal and not already used elsewhere if an OEM disk. OEM licenses are not easily transferred, but retail licenses can be.
If it turns out the original OS wasn’t Win7 as you were led to believe, you can upgrade
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The drivers listed on dell.com are all Vista Business 32 or Win7Pro drivers,, this laptop was built after XP was discontinued as an OEM option...
Will contact Dell for recovery disk ... don’t see how it would help as I loaded from a genuine win7prosp1/64 recovery disk for “latitude” and it wasn’t a burned copy... funny thing is it ALWAYS said “activated” in control panel> all control panel items > system ...