Solved How can I upgrade an Laptop with W7-Home to W7-Pro?

[Mike Lynch]

What's the best and or easiest way to accomplish this?

 

[Snick]

Hi Mike

I'm perusing this now => How best to upgrade from Win 7 home premium to Win 7 ...

I would say a valid windows 7 professional retail or enterprise key
Maybe an OEM key for the computer you are trying to upgrade if win7 pro was available on it from the factory. Has to do with the SLIC table on OEM computers. Torchwood or a few others, I believe could verify that knowing the make model, etc.

Snick

 

[Mike Lynch]

ACER Aspire 5734Z
It is old but meets my needs.
I have a Windows-7 Pro Retail DVD and Key.
I'm afraid to try it as I do not know if it will Upgrade what I have or Over Write what I have.
I would just like to Upgrade.

 

[Megahertz07]

If the Pro key you have is a Retail, just insert the DVD on the ODD drive and run setup.exe from running Windows.

It will reinstall windows as Pro and keep your data and programs. You will need to do the Updates.
I recommend you use Single file with all updates - Simplix

 

[SIW2]

Quick and easy. I have done it several times.

Keeps all your programs files settings and updates.

Type upgrade into start search box. Click windows anytime upgrade when it pops up.

Enter any win7 pro key ( in the picture it is the acer pro slp key YKHFT-KW986-GK4PY-FDWYH-7TP9F - this is not an oem machine , any pro key will do for the upgrade to run). It runs for a couple of mins and pretends to have failed.

Reboot and it will complete the upgrade to pro. It is upgraded but it is not yet activated.

Then enter your key in the system window as usual to activate.

Job done, takes only a few mins.

 

[SIW2]

It pretends to fail. Dont worry, reboot and it completes.



Now open the system window and enter the key to activate in the normal way.

 

[mcsmark]

I was looking for this too. But i have 3 additional questions.
- Will this still work now win 7 is no longer supported?
- if you have a key, why not entering that instead of the key you mention?
- the most important question : i have a C and D drive. the C drive is an SSD. So i put the users folder on drive D using a hard link or directory junction. that in order to make all this data fit. But my worry is that an update will change this.
why the update? well i installed 32 GB and now i found out that it requires a PRO edition :-(

thanks for any answer
mark

 

[SIW2]

Will this still work now win 7 is no longer supported?

yes

if you have a key, why not entering that instead of the key you mention?

You can enter ANY windows 7 pro key. It must be a pro key because that tells it the edititon to upgrade to.

It won't activate at that point. You will have to enter a valid key after you have rebooted and the edition upgrade has completed.

So i put the users folder on drive D using a hard link or directory junction

I don't know, I have never done that.

 

[mcsmark]

Thank you for your reply.

I think only MS knows if directory junctions will be saved since they know which files are replaced.

 

[townsbg]

You can use the command line to change the version. Windows Edition-Servicing Command-Line Options It will have to be the pro generic key Windows Generic Keys . GitHub It will reboot twice and then you'll have pro installed. I've done this on Windows server. Note that you won't be able to downgrade back to home.

Then you'll have to activate with your retail key. If automatic activation fails you'll have to force phone activation. https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/18715-activate-windows-7-phone.

 

[mcsmark]

ok, so i studied the info you provided.
One question : when i enter the key would it be activated? or must you always use the generic key and activate later?
For example when i enter :
Dism /online /Set-Editionrofessional /ProductKey:12345-67890-12345-67890-12345

and assume the productkey is for pro, would it activate? or would it only work with the generic key?

 

[SIW2]

I have described the simplest method using anytime upgrade.

If you want to use a different method, then go ahead. If really you want to do it with dism, generalize the os, boot into winpe and run dism offline.

 

[mcsmark]

yes and i appreciate that you provided this info. but using dism seems way simpler, and with less possible side effects. i could be wrong.
but i setup a VM with some junctions and will test both ways before i dare to do this on my actual machine.

the only reason i do all this is because recently i replaced my memory and thought to add another 16GB. then i found out i can not use it. good old times with MS-DOS were simple.

 

[SIW2]

It is simpler to use anytime upgrade.

 

[z3r010]

yes and i appreciate that you provided this info. but using dism seems way simpler, and with less possible side effects. i could be wrong.

Anytime Upgrade is much simpler with less chance of messing anything up.

 

[mcsmark]

Anytime Upgrade is much simpler with less chance of messing anything up.

yes, you are right. i tried it and dism does not work online. the other commands did work but not the upgrade haha, so now i understand the comment about winpe. So for other readers : dism is not the way, anytime works perfect as described. my symbolic links were also untouched. it just upgraded to pro. i did not activate but i trust that will also still work.
anyway, thank you all for helping. i will perform this on my actual machine after i made an image. the actual anytime process was quick. maybe because it was a clean win 7 i used for test. or maybe it does not need to do much.

 

[SIW2]

Are you going to use acer activation from their media? That was somebody else earlier in the thread, this has been going on quite a while.

Have you added nvme boot support to your z68 motherboard? I have it added to an old lga 1155 mobo, it is a bit of fun

booting nvme disk via pcie adapter on older machines

 

[mcsmark]

sorry for the late reply. I have no idea what you mean with this acer media?
i followed the procedure on a VM as described using anytime with the provided key. and that worked.
So i plan to do the same as soon as i made a backup/image om my PC.
I bought a legit prof key to activate. so that is the idea. and then i hope i can use 32 GB