Old Sony Vaio woes

I dug an old (2008?) Sony Vaio laptop out of my brother's closet that had crashed which he was never able to restore the OS. I don't own a laptop (my old 16 MB/WIN 98 doesn't really count) so I figured it may be salvageable. He has the 2 restore discs but not the recovery discs. It did not come with a Vista installation disc of course. The first restore disc works fine but when the second disc is installed it errors out around 50 - 75% completed. I noticed that the two discs contain 11 folders named 1-11 (among other folders) but these discs are missing three of those folders. Perhaps that is the way it is supposed to be but it doesn't seem logical to me. I know, MS or Sony being logical is a stretch. I was lead to believe that a special partition installed on the HD contained everything to get it back to factory settings once the restore discs were installed. Refreshing my old DOS skills, I copied that partition to a USB drive so I could examine the files on my desktop (my DOS skills are a bit rusty :-) ). To make a long story short, the D: partition has the folders but very few files as did the C: partition. It appears Sony sucks in this particular model as found on many researched websites. Sony does sell restore and recovery media for the Vaio but this model wasn't listed on their website. It was suggested somewhere that the two sets of discs may be obtained by calling Sony but many have had less than stellar experience with them. Supposedly it could cost 50 - 70 dollars for the set. I thought about buying an OEM version of WIN 7 at around $100 but neither MS nor Sony list this version as being compatible. XP and Vista are no longer sold except through various old stock sources as far as I can tell. My question is should I try to call Sony and get the original discs, try to get XP, Vista, or 7 to work, or just toss it back into the closet where it probably belongs. I have seen decent refurbished laptops go for just a couple hundred bucks more than the software to get this one up and running. I have been offered a possible one man gig at a small restaurant bar but would really need a laptop to even think about doing so. I have never played in public before so I am a bit hesitant to spend a large amount on a new, tricked out laptop just in case this falls through or I back out. Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated. For the record, I tried posting in Chrome to allow proper formatting but the dern thing crashed when I clicked on Post Message. So let me add my usual Fire Fox with this version of forum software sux concerning formatting. Jeesh, really, is it 20012 already?

If the PC is Vista compatible it will work on Windows 7.  Windows 7 basically is "Vista improved" and the hardware device drivers for Vista work with Win 7.   Actually, Win 7 will install most of the needed drivers, especially if it's connected to the internet (wired connection).  A minimum of 2GB of RAM (memory) is needed for Win 7 Home.  I would install the 32 bit OS version, unless Sony supports Vista 64 bit OS on this machine. 

A Vista PC backware to XP can have issues as different hardware drivers are needed.  I do a lot of user PC support on the Dell users forum and as Kev999 pointed out, there can be problems if the vendor does not support XP on a Vista or Win 7 system.  Audio is one major difference as Vista/Win 7 handle some sound functions differently than XP so you have to have the correct OS sound driver.

Thanks for the ideas, guys. Craig, at least the other view you saw was a bit more formatted. I may be back from the future and living in the past :-) .