Good morning folks. Many of you are probably running a build of Windows 7 on one of your machines. If so, then you need to read the latest blog post over at the Engineering Windows 7 blog regarding the Upgrade Experience. With the Release Candidate build just around the corner (no, I don’t have a date or a build number that I can share with you!) the Windows 7 team is looking for more data regarding system upgrades from Windows Vista to Windows 7 Release Candidate builds. The upgrade scenarios that are the most useful are not the “build-to-build” upgrades, but rather the broad customer experience which will be from Windows Vista to Windows 7.
You can read more about their request at their blog – the post is titled, “ Delivering a quality upgrade experience ”.
One quick note to close out this post – if you are running a Windows 7 build that was released after the official Beta build (build 7000) and try to upgrade to the Release Candidate build, you ay experience an issue when you attempt the upgrade. There is a version check for the pre-release upgrade (there will be a similar one for folks upgrading from Release Candidate builds to RTM builds). Below is the information on how to bypass this check only if you absolutely have to .
- Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
- Copy the whole image to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the pre-release build).
- Browse to the sources directory.
- Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
- Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000 (pictured below).
- Save the file in place with the same name.
- Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed.
As always – you should only be installing officially released builds from Microsoft. That’s it for today, we’ll see you on Friday! Until next time …