Windows 7 Upgrade to Windows 7 Conundrum
Talk about a tale of upgrade woes with a positive twist — Windows 7 (Home Premium) to Windows 7 (Ultimate) — here's one for you.
A client of mine purchased a really nice computer at Best Buy this week. It is a Studio XPS 8000, Intel® Core™ i7-860 processor (8MB Cache, 2.80GHz) computer with 8GB RAM and a Terabyte hard drive that came with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit. I feel it's a very nice computer that will last them for quite a while.
At the same time, they told the folks at Best Buy that they needed to upgrade the Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate since they would need Windows 7's XPMode for some older programs that will not run in Windows 7 (and you must have Windows 7 Professional or above to run XPMode). Best Buy sold them the Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade disk, Microsoft Office 2007 Home Office/Student Edition and an external hard drive enclosure for their old computer's recently replaced hard drive for use for backups and system images, etc. So far, so good. Looks like smooth sailing, right?
The client sends the computer with me to my workshop (where their old recently deceased computer already had been waiting for this) to get their old data, install the Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade and get the computer setup, get updates, install security, install some of their programs, get XPMode installed and ready to go, do backups, etc.
I start up this computer and I am really liking it! That Dell i7 Studio XPS 8000 is fast. And it has a handy little dock similar to the Mac across the top. I already knew I would love Windows 7 almost as much as I love my Mac because I have been beta testing Windows 7 Beta and then the RC1 for a while now. The more I use it, the more I am wanting one for myself! I use all kinds of operating systems, and am looking forward to working with the RTM Windows 7 Ultimate in my Virtual Box on my Linux box.
Then it was time to get ready for the upgrade. I created a system repair DVD, created an image of the current system onto the external hard drive and shut down the external hard drive. All is looking really good so far. I inserted the Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade disk and this is where it starts going really weird.
The installer comes up and I click Install. It copies files, and gets updates from the Internet to ensure smooth sailing with drivers, and then reports that I can't upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 7. Huh?! Don't they distinguish between versions of Windows 7?! No, that's not it, because it reports that you must use the Anytime Upgrade to upgrade between versions of Windows 7.
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