[WIN7] Question about "Upgrade" versions

[Catweazle]

Originally Posted by glenpinn

if the upgrade was too restrictive on how it needs to be installed.

Information coming out suggests that this time around it's gonna be worse than even the situation for Vista was.

For an 'upgrade' key to work, a previous installation needs to be in place, and unlike tyhe scenario for Vista that previous installation needs to be activated!

An activated Release Candidate install (Build 7100) of Windows 7 will work with the upgrade install key, (as would any other activated Windows 7 install of course) but the 'install as trial' trick seems to have finally been blocked.



http://www.maximumpc.com/article/new...%99s_installed

http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/arch...ets_an_an.html




That's a huge inconvenience, if those articles are accurate in their reporting! Means that forever after, if you redo your rig or move your license to a different rig (a retail upgrade license is a perpetual, transferrable license remember, just like a full install retail license) you gotta first install the qualifying product and then buggarise about activating it as well. And if you've stuffed up an install and had to redo it again a coupla days or so later, triggeriong refusal of automatic activation, you gotta buggerise around with phone calls about two separate activations, just to get your legitimate license in working condition!



Mickeysoft has kinda lost the plot here, methinks. They're aggressively pushing the retail upgrade product for Windows 7, yet they've included a draconian restriction which is inevitably gonna lead to a lot of pissed off people.



Anyways, looks like this time around the astute folk will need to maintain a drive image of an activated qualifying product installation, and bung that onto the new hard drive before they boot from the upgrade disk to perform a clean install!

[glenpinn]

without quoting your post, i dare say everything you mentioned might indeed be right, and for those who buy the "upgrade" to have to install the qualifying operating system and activate it just to install it most likely will put most buyers off.

pretty crazy way to do it, but seems like they are safe guarding themselves for sure.

it would be a far better situation for them to simply drop the retail costs to a reasonable level and not bother with any upgrade versions at all.

cheers