Reformatting With Win7 RC

I installed Win7 RC a while back, and even reformatted and reinstalled once or twice on this machine (I'm anal retentive and like to do fresh installs a couple times a year).

But now that Win7 has come out, would I still be able to install + activate my Win7 RC? Or will it tell me that the serial is no longer valid and make me buy Win7? I've been hearing some things that make me think this might be the case. Plus, they took down the RC download a little while ago so I'm wondering if they've shut down any current and future RC activations/authentications.

Basically my question is...if I decide to reformat and reinstall RC tomorrow, will I still be able to since RC is no longer being offered and Win7 is at retail? Will the serial I have for RC be blocked for activation?

Thanks in advance.

You can use that RC to upgrade to Win7 which is half the price of full version.

You can even boot from the disk and do a Custom formatted install, the cleanest of all. Upgrade will see the RC when it scans the HDD.

Other than that, the RC is supposed to expire June 1st, but start shutting down every 2 hours in March to get people to the stores. Who knows if the keys still work for fresh installs?

Still haven't found any info on this. I'm getting kind of paranoid now. "What if I need to reformat tomorrow?!?! OMG" is running through my head now.

I have a second question now. What is the latest (or last) RC build? I've seen some with something like 7600.something so now I'm curious about that. I have 7100.something.

So now I'm wondering if A) I can get a hold of a newer RC build and 2) assuming my original question about re-installing RC now that retail is out is still possible, would I need a new serial for a different build? And I guess most importantly, would changing to a newer build even be worth it?

I'm not able to shell out the money for retail just yet, which is why I'm trying to get the most out of RC while I can.

Thanks.

The RC was only one version, just before RTM which is the final version. It still had some bugs and was not as polished and fast as the RTM because it has a lot of monitoring software on it.

Reinstalls are no longer necessary now that Windows 7 has brought imaging to the masses. Just click on Backup and Restore Center, create an image of your HDD as it is now, save the image to an external drive, and you can reimage the HDD (or a replacement) easily in 15 minutes by booting from the Installer's Repair console.