Home Premium 64-bit limits me to 16GB RAM. What can I do?

I recently doubled my RAM to 32GB. I then found out that Windows 7 Home Premium limits memory to 16GB (for product segmentation reasons; Professional versions don't have this restriction).

It used to be the case that you could simply use the Anytime Upgrade service to pay Microsoft $75 or whatever to upgrade from Home Premium to Professional.

Well, funny story... Along came something called Windows 10 and a series of reprehensible tactics of strong-arming Windows 7 users into "upgrading" [sic] to Windows 10. Among them being the removal of Anytime Upgrade and the removal of all retail sales of Windows 7.

So, having said all that, is there anything I can do to access the other half of my 32GB of memory whilst remaining on Windows 7? If the answer is "yes, but only using methods that are of, uh, questionable legality" and you don't feel comfortable elaborating, at least tell me that there is a way and I'll, uh, take it under advisement with my good friend Google?

I'm on my knees in front of Microsoft with a fistful of dollars that I'm begging them to accept from me to let me use the other half of my RAM, and they're refusing to take my money.

Thanks.

Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit-Newegg.com

HAVOC said:

Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit-Newegg.com

But that's an OEM version. It won't let me upgrade to Pro with an OEM version key. Although I guess I could reformat but that's a huge pain in the ass.

AddRAM said:

There`s no way around it, you`d have to install W7 Pro. But you could upgrade to 10 Home, Windows 10 Home doesn`t limit you to 16 GB, but that`s a decision you`d have to make, but it would be free.

At this point, in 2017, I think we all know that we're all here on sevenforums because we don't want anything to do with Windows 10.

Mellon Head said:

Didn't know that was still available. I know what I'm buying tomorrow. :)

Question for you Mellon. I've never even considered win10 but have recently been looking into it. From what I can tell if you are willing to go through the tweaking effort, win10 can be made to not call home or do automatic updates, and can be customized to look and operate like win7. Is that true? If so, why hang on to win7 and/or buy a new copy?