W7 Home Premium upgrade to Ultimate

Hello, I'm wondering if anyone could help me with this situation. I just bought a new Sony Vaio (VPCS131FM) and it came with a Windows 7 Home Premium operating system. The laptop comes with lots of Vaio exclusive drivers and software. All the drivers and software are available to download from the Sony Website. I bought Windows 7 Ultimate and want to do a "Clean" Install and was going to download and install all the original drivers and software from the sony website, such as the Vaio Gate, Sony Care, Camera Utility, bluetooth, etc... but accoring to sony support site and a service rep I spoke with, these drivers and software will only work with the original operating system (Windows 7 Home Premium)... I don't quite buy this because it's the same base operating system the drivers and software should work if I try to re-install them. So if anyone could please give me some insight before I try doing this, I would appreciate it.

EdinMuha said:

Hello, I'm wondering if anyone could help me with this situation. I just bought a new Sony Vaio (VPCS131FM) and it came with a Windows 7 Home Premium operating system. The laptop comes with lots of Vaio exclusive drivers and software. All the drivers and software are available to download from the Sony Website. I bought Windows 7 Ultimate and want to do a "Clean" Install and was going to download and install all the original drivers and software from the sony website, such as the Vaio Gate, Sony Care, Camera Utility, bluetooth, etc... but accoring to sony support site and a service rep I spoke with, these drivers and software will only work with the original operating system (Windows 7 Home Premium)... I don't quite buy this because it's the same base operating system the drivers and software should work if I try to re-install them. So if anyone could please give me some insight before I try doing this, I would appreciate it.

What you can do is an anytime upgrade to ultimate instead of a clean install. Since you want to retain Sony drivers and apps, a clean install doesnt make sense anyway. Anytime upgrade is a non-destructive process that just upgrades to a higher version by unlocking features not available in the lower version. Takes around 10 minutes.

Once you've finished upgrading, check all the software you want works. If something doesnt, look up the Sony support site or google around.

I guess i'm not familiar the the Anytime Upgrade, but I'm sure I can figure it out. So I'm assuming I'll just need the Ultimate CD and a product key and so will the outcome of the Upgrade be just the same as installing a Clean Version of Windows Ultimate?

Follow this tut.

Windows Anytime Upgrade - How to

Yes, you'll need the Ultimate CD and product key. An Anytime upgrade key is a cheaper option because you have already paid for the home premium but you can do the AU with a full product key as well.

The outcome of the AU will be completely different from a clean install. AU will just unlock Ultimate features, everything including installed apps and drivers and user data will remain unaffected. Its a painless way of switching from a lower to a higher edition. OTOH, a clean install will be a virgin win7 install, all apps and drivers will need to be reinstalled and any data on the windows partition that is not backed up will be wiped out.

Also, since you have already paid for the home premium, please make recovery disks using the inbuilt Sony recovery software before doing the AU, that'll let you revert to the factory home premium install anytime you want.

Well that's the thing I already have a brand new Windows 7 Ultimate CD that I got at school for a steal deal. The reason I was going to perform a Clean Install is because I was told that was the best thing to do for performance. I suppose I could just use the CD and perform an Upgrade from my Windows 7 Home Premium version to the Ultimate version and that should still keep all my drivers and original software. My only concern was the performace I will get.

EdinMuha said:

Well that's the thing I already have a brand new Windows 7 Ultimate CD that I got at school for a steal deal. The reason I was going to perform a Clean Install is because I was told that was the best thing to do for performance. I suppose I could just use the CD and perform an Upgrade from my Windows 7 Home Premium version to the Ultimate version and that should still keep all my drivers and original software. My only concern was the performace I will get.

The reason a clean install performs better is that it wipes out the OEM's bloatware- this refers to various OEM apps and drivers that come pre-loaded on OEM machines, many of these are set to start at bootup and consume cpu and ram. In your case, you actually want to use at least some of this stuff. The other thing is that with the large hard drives and huge memory that most of have these days, this issue is not as important as it used to be.

I would suggest you do the AU at the moment, sort out the Sony stuff you want to retain and uninstall what you dont. Use a safe tool like CCleaner to cleanup left over files and folders from the uninstalls and remove orphaned entries from the registry. Then defrag the system.

Use it for a month or so and if the system feels sluggish or you notice excessive RAM and CPU consumption in moderate use, try out the clean install.

I would not waste the Ultimate license on a machine which has Home Premium unless you actually need the additional features which are not that much different.

But you can use the Ultimate disk to do your clean reinstall of Home Premium when the time comes. You simply extract the ISO image file using ImgBurn, run the ei.cfg removal tool to unlock all versions, then burn all-versions DVD using ImgBurn at 4x speed to install with the Product Key on your COA sticker.

You can try this now before you set it up - make the Recovery Disks so you have a path back - or you can try it later after running awhile with the Sony bloatware and useless factory utilities which have better versions built into Win7. As you stated, any drivers needed can be found on the Sony Downloads webpage for your model; you can also back up the windows/system32/drivers files which holds them all.

If you want to wait, you can also gradually clean up the bloatware using these steps.

When you're ready to clean reinstall to enjoy unhindered Win7, here are tips for getting a purrfect reinstall of factory OEM: re-install windows 7