[Ask] upgrading from starter to ultimate

Hi, I hope that its not a repetition from someone else's question.

I have bought an Acer netbook with a preinstalled windows7 starter. I have the windows7 Ultimate CD. Now that I am dissapointed with starter, I feel like upgrading to the Ultimate, the same one that I use on my Asus. My question is:

if i offline upgrade the win7 from starter to ultimate, does it mean that i lose my preinstalled starter? or will it still be stored in the recovery sector somewhere in the HDD?

you know, Thats because the ones that come with preinstalled windows are more expensive, so if i lose the preinstalled starter, i dont think i will proceed with the upgrading and keep using the starter.

As long as you don't delete the preinstall portion of the HDD you should be able to go back to starter if you really need to.

k, thanx Lee

Mark Phelps said:

There are lots of different Win7 versions (Retail, OEM, Windows Anytime Upgrade) and each presents its own challenges regarding upgrading and activation.

If you want an easy way to restore the Win7 you have, download the free version of Macrium Reflect, use its option to create a Restore CD, plug in an external drive, and do an image backup of your current installation. If anything then goes wrong with your "upgrade", you will be able to stick in the Restore CD, plug in your external drive, and in only a few minutes, complete restore the working version you have now.

Suggesting this because you're going to doing an "upgrade" of an OEM version to (probably) something else. Don't personally know enough about the finer details of activation to know if your new version will remain activated, or if you will have to jump through some hoops to get it activated.

At least with restore capability, if you simply can't activate the upgraded version, you will be able to easily restore what you have now.

Thanx Mark. Im not worried about the new installation, or whether I can activate it or not since I have the activation key that comes with the CD. But it's a different one to the starter preinstalled. I heard that in these netbooks we have a recovery partition that we dont need a cd to recover. I was at a loss whether I would lose the recovery data if I install a new windows. CMIIW, iso far that I can understand the recovery partition will remain safe if I dont format it during the new installation. what I willl do is format the system partition containing the starter, not the recovery partition, that way once i need to recover and I dont have an external CD drive, i can still use the starter version from the recovery section. is that correct?

Look in All Programs for a Recovery utility that allows you to make Recovery disks off of the Recov partition.

I would also save a Win7 or Macrium backup image of your install which is a more useful backup image than Recovery.

You probably know by now that MS wants upgrades within Win7 to be via Anytime Upgrade which simply unlocks the hidden features of the higher version purchased. Many have reported that retail Win7 keys for that version can also be used in Anytime Upgrade in place of AU key.

There is also a popular workaround to in-place Upgrade between Win7 versions by changing two registry keys. Let me know if you need it.

thank you everyone, thanx for the help.

Barman58 said:

Just reading through the first post again - make sure that you have a separate legitimate key for the windows ultimate as the one on your other netbook is limited to one install

It came in post 5 Nigel. I was waiting for it too:

Im not worried about the new installation, or whether I can activate it or not since I have the activation key that comes with the CD. But it's a different one to the starter preinstalled.