Installing Windows 7 Home Premium over Windows 7 Ultimate RC

They don't give you a lot of "heads up" on how this gets done until you find yourself into it, and then you literally learn by doing. In the post below, I mentioned that I read that the setup for the retail versions won't let you upgrade over the Ultimate RC by default. They should have added "or any other way - you have to do a clean install", meaning you have to save all your files beforehand, and then install the retail version over your (better) RC copy and then re-install all your files and programs and whatever. And I was right - it's a pain in the ass, and all because somebody in Redmond got paranoid about us putting one over on them if it was any other way.


Something else you should be prepared for while you're carefully saving your documents and your third-party programs and whatever.... Your documents will go back into the new setup just fine, but some of your programs that worked fine in the Ultimate RC of Win 7 may not survive copying to and from a DVD to make the transfer. You may find some will pop up a message saying it didn't install correctly, and you should contact your mother, or the program's makers, or anybody but Microsoft, the guys who engineered this goddamned problem. And for what it's worth, my favourite photo-editing program after moving told me that it doesn't work in this version of Windows.  I said, "Bullshit! It works fine in the  Ultimate RC, so why shouldn't it work in a version with less to it?" And I'm right - it tries to tell me it doesn't want to, but when I click on the box that says "Run anyway" it works fine. This is just a gimmick, because this program just brought out a new upgrade with more features and a higher price tag, and they're trying to bamboozle users of the old version into spending another $80 for the newer one. So they're telling you it won't work in the Home Premium version of an O/S in which it works fine in the Ultimate version. They must think we aren't going to find out for ourselves. I've got some news for those guys - Windows 7 can and does run a whole hell of a lot of programs that we couldn't run on Vasta Vista, and it even runs some that date back to the beginnings of XP. If it's NT-based, and runs on an NTFS disk, it can probably run on Windows 7. Why?  Because they intended it to.


So if you're upgrading from the Windows 7 RC to the retail version, be prepared to do the  clean install, or as Microsoft calls it, the Custom install, rather than the Upgrade. I even hacked the setup file like that expert suggested, so it wouldn't refuse the upgrade option, and it still wouldn't do it. So the expert's hack on the installing source file doesn't work. I've been hours replacing everything on here, by way of proving all that.  So you can't always believe everything you read from the so-called experts. But I will say this for it - once it gets started on the installing, it moves right along. The part that takes the time is putting back your own files and pet programs afterward.