Windows 7 professional (1 Viewer)

I have Windows 7 prof on my pc and I've not had any probs. My daughter has Windows 7 (amateur!) and she has been having hard disk warning messages (not sure exactly what). A friend of hers has said that upgrading to Windows 7 professional would sort out her problems. As she has quite an expensive laptop (£750) she's not in a position to replace it, so I'm wondering whether I should get her Windows 7 professional. Does anyone know
a) is it possible to buy an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 7 professional?
b) can she get a discount as a student?
c) if it really is a hard disk fault, is it possible to replace a hard disk in a laptop and would this be cheaper than buying a new laptop?
Sorry to ask so many questions!
Ken

Hi Ken,
a. Yes
b. yes

http://store.digitalriver.com/store/msshgb/en_GB/ContentTheme/pbPage.SHHomePbPage

c. yes much cheeper. Hard drives are cheep as these days.

It would be useful to know the warning message, to be honest I doubt that an upgrade will fix the problem.

Backup now would be my best advice.

If you can find out the make of the hard drive you can get hd test software from the makers websites and see what they come up with.

A proggy like SIW will tell you the manufacturer.

http://www.gtopala.com/

Have a good one

What GrahameNZ said.
There are virtually no problems that an upgrade would solve.
The exact error message i the key to solving this problem.

Yup, the exact message is needed here.

Once the data is backed up safely (priority), try installing Hard Disk Sentinel and looking through the stats given for signs of errors and faults. http://www.hdsentinel.com/ or http://majorgeeks.com/Hard_Disk_Sentinel_d7520.html

Malware infections can also trigger these kinds of 'error messages'!

There is also no such thing as Win7 amateur either, I presume you mean 'Premium' and mostly the differences are to do with business networking and security etc. If she has a 'hardware' issue, no other O/S is going to sort that out so the advice there was a bit 'duff' in my opinion. However as others have said, the exact message of the 'error' would help pinpoint it - it may be something as innocuous as 'running out of virtual memory disk space' which is easy to solve.