Clean Install with a Upgrade Windows 7 Version

My current 3 yo Win7 home premium is rather gunkerd-up, I was advised to do a clean install. What I want to do is go out, buy a win7 ultimate disc, and replace the current o/s - but I want to save all my settings, shortcuts, tweaks, gadgets, 3rd party programs, task scheduler, etc... LOTS of customization work done over the years and I want to preserve it. In fact, if I had to re-install every program, reconfigure every shortcut, it would be more work than the benefit of the clean upgrade install.
I want to replace 'the guts' so to speak; while leaving my interface intact.

Will this 'double install' option do this for me? And if things go screwy, can I use a full system image backup to get things back to where they were? Atlas (my comp) actually is running 'OK' but I know it could run a lot better.

Having a little trouble:

This is an awesome tutorial, by the way, just didn't work out in my case.

I installed Windows 7 pro 64 bit for someone with an upgrade key for it. We did a clean install after replacing the hard drive. I got the activation error saying it's for upgrades only. I tried option THREE, but still got the error.

Called Microsoft, they basically told me to do the same thing mentioned here in option FOUR, which I did. Popped the cd in, hit upgrade, and went with it. Tried to activate, and got the same error.

The funny thing is, on the old hard drive we did something similar, where pro 64 was already installed and we were repairing the OS with an in place upgrade, and it activated fine.

Any idea how to get this thing to activate?

Brink said:

Hello Bascotie, and welcome to Seven Forums.

If you have not already, you might see if you may be able to activate by phone. :)

I did try to activate by phone originally but got the same error (before doing the in place upgrade).

I tried option 3 again, and when I rebooted I got a "Windows must be reinstalled" message saying an unauthorized change to windows was made.

I used a System Builder (OEM) Windows 7 Pro 64 disc I had and used the upgrade key along with it AFTER installing (aka skipped the step during install to put in key)

So it looks like I did follow step one (just looked over it again to make sure). thanks for the quick reply!