Windows 7: upgrade to 7 WITHOUT reinstalling; HOW TO??

I have a laptop with a beta 7 that is running splendidly. This replaced Vista Media Center Edition and this beta was a totally clean install. All software is installed and running just fine. I have purchased 5 u/g copies of home premium. What I HAVE is ultimate. How can I just change this to a home premium install, register the new serial numbers for the paid for U/G and just carry on? I really do not want to go thru the pain of reinstalling and tweaking everything again. Please help!!! I am not beyond editing the registry if there is a way to make that work. And I think I have til March to get this done, right??



Thanks for everything, in advance!!

Im open to correction,but im not sure if you can downgrade from Ultimate to a lower spec OS.

A quick google and i found this,be warned though,i cant vouch for it nor can i say if its legal.

UNAWAVE - Downgrade Ultimate to Home Premium or Professional

Officially, it's impossible.

If you hit up Google though, there are ways around it.

Do you really want to do this though. Agreed it's painful to backup and restore your personal data and reinstall all applications, but from what I've read RC1 had a lot of debug code in it that was removed for the released (RTM) version, along with quite a few additional fixes.

A clean install is definitely the way to go.

Dozens have now reported success upgrading/downgrading RC with the workaround: Upgrade the Windows 7 RC to any retail version Icrontic Tech

For the first month, I distributed the MS developer's blog warning about RC not being upgradable in-place. But too many have done it and all report fine performance.

I performed one cross country via Remote Desktop last week while removing an XP dual boot from first partition. User cannot believe how much better RTM is from RC.

There is no performance hit reported so far.

So is all of this saying that tho I CAN do this, if I did NOT and did a clean install instead that the computer would be legions faster, even tho I am quite happy with the wonder performance I have now??

Run on sentences FTL.

While most people will say a clean install is faster, I question the cost/benefit ratio.

If you are happy with the wonderful performance, I suggest you try the upgrade path.

I strongly suggest you make a backup of your system though.

Actually, I was trying to say the opposite. Upgrading the RC is worth it based on what many have reported so far. You can later do the clean install if not satisfied with performance.

But how I determine if my Gateway MX6920 can use 64bit vs. 32??

If you go to Control Panel then system, it will have a line for your Processor. Google it and select the intel or AMD link. On the processor page, it should have a line for 64-bit applications.

Edit

If you go 64-bit, and you have the 32-bit beta, you will probably have to do a clean install.