Upgrade Question

I setup a PC for a friend a couple months ago and installed Windows 7 RC for the time being. He luckily pre-order Win7 during the half-off special Microsoft ran and he just got his disc in the mail.

Question...the disc he got is an upgrade and it says it's a Vista upgrade to Windows 7. Since his machine right now does not have Vista but Win7 RC, will this cause any problems?

I saw the posts regarding using an upgrade disc to do a clean install which is definitely what I would prefer to do, but for the sake of not having to backup all his docs and all that I might tell him to just do the upgrade himself...just wanted to make sure that there won't be any issues using an upgrade meant for Vista on a PC running Win7 RC.

Thanks.

Well that's actually good news. Even though having him do an upgrade install would have been easier for me (since I wouldn't have to do it for him), a clean install is better anyway. I always like to do clean installs (backup + reformat + install = smooth sailing) but I've never used an upgrade disc for any version of Windows before. I've always used a full retail disc or OEM disc with an appropriate serial.

Doing a clean install shouldn't be dependent on what OS is already on the computer, since you're reformatting anyway, but I just wasn't sure if an upgrade disc would allow that or not.

Thanks for the help.

The Upgrade scans the HDD after booting from the disk and then passes a flag to allow activation before any deleting/formatting is done. So you can do the cleanest possible install with it by booting into the installer, choosing Custom and using Advanced tools to wipe everything and reformat.

The RC has code conflicts with RTM discouraging in-place upgrades. See here: Can I do an In-Place upgrade from Windows 7 Release Candidate To Release Code?


But you could do a Custom install from the desktop and still save all of the files in a windows.old folder for later distribution. Drivers are in windows/system32/drivers.