Anytime Pro upgrade - buy where?

save a Windows 7 backup image both before and after the Upgrade

You bet. Always do Acronis WD for these.

TechGeekShop - saw them when Goggled, but never heard of them. Anyone dealt with them?

Funny, looked at my Anytime boxes. No cd. Human memory is a strange thing...

Now, just for curiousity's sake, if I restored a W7 Home to before the Anytime upgrade, would that license be useable again? Or is it OEM-style, that is, tied to the mb it was originally installed on? Or does it adapt to the license type of the native W7 Home? No plan to do this, just wondering how valid those ebay listings would be. For my friend's situation, I need to play it complete safe, so I'd probably avoid anything that wasn't sealed or came from a reputable reseller.

The underlying Home Premium can be restored or reinstalled if you decide to no longer use the Anytime Upgrade - which is a retail license so can migrate to other PCs which qualify.

If the underlying OS is OEM then it's restricted to the same mobo; if retail it can migrate also.

gregrocker: So to be sure I understand the Anytime license - Imagine I have W7 Home OEM on box 1 and on box 2; I apply the Anytime license to box 1; decide I want it on box 2 instead, so restore Home on box 1 and then I can reapply the anytime license to box 2. Is that right?

Britton30: how kind of you to make such an effort to check that out. Thank you.

Yes. Anytime Upgrade is retail and can migrate freely as long as it is on only one installation at a time.

I have no idea why they are trying to hide copies of their only successful operating system. Business is moving off of XP almost entirely into Win7 so the idea they can cut its life short at all is just absurd.

So, in theory at least, those bay Anytimes could be legit.

I know what you mean about XPers going to Win7. I showed my friend 2 of my machines, a Win7 box and a Win8 box that are configured to look almost identical (desktop mode) and are not very much different from the look & feel of XP in Classic Mode. She opted for Win7 because she has a Win7 laptop that i configured with an XP look and didn't want to deal with TIFKAM (love that term: The Interface Formerly Known As Metro). Mostly she chose Win7 Pro because it includes an XP license that she needs for an Access97 mail merge app that I wrote years ago and just cannot get to work natively under Win7/8. Her business is a couple of years away from retirement so it's just not worth converting. She wouldn't be converting to Win7 now if XP support was continuing - it fits her needs. Came very close to just running XP boxes on a nonWeb lan and having separate Web boxes. Even Linux would have been seriously in the running there if I was more familiar with it. Not at all interested in MS push towards cloud os & apps. Kind of Mainframe with terminals - everything old is new again.

Oh, well. Thanks for your enlightenment, gregrocker.