alright i've been googling this and trying things for hours and i'm stuck. here is my problem:
I just received a new laptop for Christmas to replace my older Toshiba Satellite L300D-06T and I intended to give the Toshiba to my brother to replace his desktop. Thinking I am oh so clever, I took all the relevant personal files off the old laptop and moved them to the new laptop and proceeded to try and put on a fresh install of Windows 7. This is where it gets tricky; my Toshiba came with Vista 64 bit already installed but because of the time that I bought my laptop I was eligible for a free Win7 upgrade when it finally dropped.
The thing that caused all this ruckus is that I am no computer master and I discovered after completing this installation (which I read somewhere else shouldn't have worked because of the product serial) that my disc was an upgrade and not a full install. Thus I was eventually required to find the "shadow partition" (apparently an interesting feature exclusive to Toshiba Satellites?) and access the system restoration options this way. I input all my command prompts and was able to "restore" the windows.old file and the master boot.
After all of this, I booted up just fine and I went into disk cleanup and started clearing things out this way. In the process I deleted my previous windows installations and now certain things don't quite work (internet explorer will no longer run or install) and I have just about had it. Any suggestions on how to delete all of the Windows 7 messiness I have loaded onto here and get back to the basic Vista (so I can upgrade the system correctly) would be much appreciated. If anything is unclear or confusing let me know! thanks all :)