Users who received Windows Vista already installed on their machine will likely only have a rather old and bloated recovery partition to fall back on. Unlike Windows 7 and 8 which can be downloaded direct from Microsoft as an ordinary ISO file, Vista needs a bit of work to create an ISO image which you can burn and then install from. The Marketplace version was available as a “Digital Locker Download” which gave you access to download 3 files, 2 Windows Image Format (WIM) files and an executable. Whether you purchased your copy of Windows Vista direct from the Windows Marketplace or it came pre-installed on your machine, the chances are you won’t have a bootable DVD around with clean Vista installation files on it. Don’t forget, Windows 7 and 8 are in part based on Vista so it did in fact get a number of things right. Although it received criticism in the early days, in reality a fully patched and updated Windows Vista isn’t that bad and is still a perfectly usable operating system. We might almost be on the latest version 10 of Microsoft Windows, but there are still a lot of people around that have Windows Vista installed on their machines, especially laptops.

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