Install RC over Beta 7100?

Didn't see this addressed yet....

My wife's Acer laptop came with Vista Home installed, and we were resigned to that when I couldn't find some XP drivers for it. When 7 came out and the first Beta version worked on my workshop mule, I decided to put the next Beta release (7100 Ultimate) on the laptop as an upgrade to keep my wife's files, photos, etc. intact. I got the product key for it from M$ download site.

We bought the 7 Home Premium at the mfr's reduced-price offer and just got it. I am debating whether to back everything up, format the drive and install the 64-bit version, or continue with the 32-bit version....but, if I go that route, does anyone know if the RC Home Premium will install over-the-top on the Beta Ultimate?

I think it might, while disabling the Ultimate's exclusive features when I use the Premium's product key, but the wild card is how much the RC was changed from Beta 7100. Thoughts?

See my second post in this thread...Have a feeling the part about editing the file mentioned would apply:

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...d.php?t=242037

I have been researching this and have found multiple sites, including a microsoft site, that confirms this approach. However, I have also found a couple of sites that indicate this approach will fail if you are trying to upgrade with W7 Home Premium. The reason for the failure is that W7 RC is the Ultimate version and the upgrade software does not view moving from Ultimate to Home Premium as a valid upgrade. I have not tried this yet so I don't know if this will fail or not.

However, I have also found a couple of sites that provide a RC registry hack where you change the RC registry edition ID to Home Premium and then do the upgrade using the method described.

As Steve noted this is always risky and fraught with potential problems, so do this at your own risk. Being the wife's computer make sure you have good backups with which to recover.

I also found a reference to Windows Easy transfer failing for a similar reason, even with a clean install and upgrade. This may have been user specific and failure for other reasons, but again a good reason to have a full back with separate backup of your individual data files.

Good Luck and let us know if it works - I always prefer other people to jump first so I can see how far the drop is. :p

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Divergent Species

However, I have also found a couple of sites that provide a RC registry hack where you change the RC registry edition ID to Home Premium and then do the upgrade using the method described.

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Have links? I have all her stuff backed up to the storage partition, so if I brick the OS I don't mind. If I do have to install from scratch, I'll put the 64-bit version on it.

As previously mentioned, this procedure is not recommended and to be used at your own risk. Further, I have not tried this, so I cannot confirm it is an actual upgrade issue or the proposed solution will fix it, but here goes.

This link specifically discusses upgrading in place RC to Home Premium RTM.

Link 1

This link talks about upgrading RC (Ultimate) to RTM (Enterprise), but uses the same technique.

Link 2

All of the above assumes you have a valid upgrade copy.