I do agree with your assenment that a clean install or upgrade from vista is best BUT...I have upgraded from W7 - 7000, to 7022 to 7048 to 7057
to 7068 to 7077 adding different software over that time and had no major issues...so am just going by my experience....your assesment is more correct for the average user...IMO...
Upgrading Might Work, but in the long run it sometime opens new bugs up.
It is possible to upgrade, you obviously not read the article right. But anyway I always do a fresh install. I done an upgrade with 7000 because people were having trouble installing gta iv at the time so I upgraded with gta iv already installed on vista. I was rewarded because It worked good
I don't quite understand the instructions for a smooth upgrade.
Why burn the ISO to a DVD an then copy its image to "a storage location" & does it matter where that location really is? Surely one edits the file before burning it to the DVD?Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD
Copy the whole image to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the pre-release build)
Browse to the sources directory
Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad
Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000
Save the file in place with the same name
Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed
Also, what do they mean by "lower than the down level build" - does that mean lower than the existing build which in my case is 7000, in which case what build number should I substitute?
They only say that because windows can not mount the .iso without 3rd party tools.
All you need to do is mount the iso in poweriso, then extract the contents to a computer needing upgrade. Any drive or partition is fine as long as the Win 7 currently sees it and uses it fine.
Then you could follow the rest of their steps about editing etc...
So I basically edit the file, use 7000 as the magic number (my current build) and then burn it to a DVD right?
I'm OK with the burning part, it's just all this faffing around that puzzled me. I'm only upgrading one machine so I don't need the ISO afterwards.
Nah. After you extract (from burned DVD or the downloaded .iso with poweriso), then edit to allow upgrade...you can run the setup.exe from right there in the folder where you've extracted to.
What Microsoft are saying that they would rather you clean install over an older build than upgrade. Their main push is to see what the general public (not us build nuts LOL) does with Windows 7, this mean that most will still have Vista & they want to test under those upgrade conditions.
Burning to a DVD will allow for booting off the DVD if a repair is required, also if you plan to 'clean' install the OS. Un upgrade can be run straight from the location on the hard drive.
By default the RC release will not allow build to build upgrade so altering the file contents to a lower build will overcome this obsticle.
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