If you’ve been running Windows 7 Beta or Windows 7 RC (release candidate), you may be wondering if you can upgrade to the official release version of Windows 7.
The official answer is no.
Microsoft has decided that if you are running Windows 7 beta or RC, you have to start over with a clean install.
Perhaps this is because they feel that the final version of Windows may have significant differences from the beta or RC version that would make an upgrade problematic. Perhaps your legitimate version of the operating system will start shutting down in March 2010 when the beta versions are set to stop working.
Or maybe there is no reason at all.
As you may have guessed, there is an unofficial answer to the upgrade question as well. Otherwise there would be no point in writing this article.
The unofficial answer is: yes, you can upgrade a beta or RC installation of windows to the RTM version.
To do this, you have to download the Windows 7 RTM ISO, mount the image on a virtual DVD drive, copy it to a local folder, then make some modifications to the cversion.ini file.
Full instructions ar provided by Bapun at SolidBlogger.
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