Is it still possible to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 for free?

Just fyi, it's a Dell PC I bought brand new from Best Buy, apparently during the short lifespan of Vista.  It came with Vista pre-installed and did not come with a disk.  It has a recovery partition(D:), but when I run the recovery program, it errors out almost immediately.  In all honesty, I didn't know when I bought it that it had Vista, or I wouldn't have bought it in the first place, but I never even knew they offered a free upgrade to Windows 7, or I would have jumped on that opportunity right away.  It was being used primarily as an internet PC, and another family member somehow managed to really jack it up.  It still functions as an internet PC, but that is about all it is good for.  It is missing some system files.  If I could even repair the installation, I would be content with that, but I can't even do that.  Thanks for everyone's help though.  I appreciate it.  At this point, I'm considering installing Linux on it.  Just kidding.  :)

Glad to help.

You can run into activation problems if you don't know what type of license you are transferring.

And it just wastes their time doing it.

And with second hand large office/organisation computers you may run into the fact that they are using Volume Licensing/Software Assurance activation on many computers, which you can't transfer to your private machine or continue using on the bought second hand machine either as it requires regular activation.

Cheers.