So, I have this older laptop that has a stuffed CDROM. So the only option fora clean install was to install from a USB key. So after a quick Google search I found these great instructions for creating a bootable USB stick to install windows 7 from. The only change was to use Xcopy to copy the install contents from the CD to the USB Key. This allowed me to make sure i got all hidden and empty folders.
So after alot of mucking around in my Windows VM to finally get the USB fob created its now happily installing on to the old laptop. The laptop is an old HP, with no LCD screen, SO it will be come my torrent downloader and also my VI Client for my EXSi server. I will just RDP into it from the mac.
This will save me having to have the ESXi server running all the time as its a power hog and it was only really running Windows7 as a play thing.