Kurt has given you good advice -- as always -- but Microsoft do now have an absolutely superb site:
Anyone who is moving to Windows 7 absolutely should go and read through what is available, whether experienced or not.
In particular the knotty question of how to proceed if you have XP installed and want to move to Windows 7 has a superb section (as does VISTA to Windows 7) that deals with everything that I myself was unsure about.
Go to this part of Windws 7 Help
See the green box?
and navigate from there.
Here are the links for XP and for VISTA:
From XP
From VISTA
There's a video that I've not watched yet and a set of instructions that tell you absolutely eveything that anyone could want to know. Look to the right side of the top of the first page and you will see
Print this Tutorial
and that is a must -- most people will probably want to print the PDF version for which you need Adobe Reader -- ask if you don't have that -- it runs to 12 pages and I printed mine double-sided. It's the best 6 pages worth of paper I've used!
You don't say what version of Windows you have on your PC but I'll assume it's VISTA so you have a choice of Upgrade or Migrate or Clean Install. The website explains the difference between these and that with XP you cannot Upgrade which is the Install on top of route.
These documents do deal with questions like the order in which you do things, some of which were unexpected to me like with the Migrate route after you have installed Windows 7 you bring back your Transferred files before you install the applications that use them!
And again something I was not sure about -- you run the Windows 7 installation disk from within the existing Windows not by booting to it if you want to migrate.
It also says to go through the installation of Windows 7 and then install the drivers and specifically mentions with laptops you will need to do this to get things like the Function Key to work.
In my experience with Windows 7 RTM on a clean install it has practically every driver to get a desktop working including accessing the internet which is necessary it says for the installation process and I'm not sure if it says this or not but I would say you must use a wired connection and not a wireless connection since wireless connections often require that little bit of extra software to get them working.
I hope that helps -- do read that site and print the instructions for your version of Windows and get the Windows Transfer Utility downloaded and installed on your version of Windows before you start to install Windows 7.
If youy have Imaging Software and can make an image of your partition as it is you will be very happy if things go wrong as they always can!
Hugh | 
