Forums | MacLife

In their latest blog post, the Windows 7 team discusses upgrading to the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) build when it's released (which is expected to occur sometime next month). In the post, Microsoft asks Windows 7 beta users who would like to upgrade to RC1 to actually revert back to Windows Vista before installing the Windows 7 RC. Apparently upgrading from the Windows 7 beta is possible, but the team hasn't designed the OS to be upgraded this way. Microsoft says "you might run across some oddities after upgrade. We experience these internally at Microsoft occasionally but we don’t always track them down and fix them because they take time away from bugs that would not only manifest themselves during this one-time pre-release operation."

Upgrading from Windows XP isn't recommended either: "We realized at the start of this project that the “upgrade” from XP would not be an experience we think would yield the best results. There are simply too many changes in how PCs have been configured (applets, hardware support, driver model, etc.) that having all of that support carry forth to Windows 7 would not be nearly as high quality as a clean install. This is something many of you know and already practice. We do provide support for moving files and settings and will prompt at setup time, but applications will need to be reinstalled. We know that for a set of customers this tradeoff seems less than perfect, but we think the upfront time is well worth it."

As always, the best method for installing a new OS is from a clean hard drive; the Windows 7 release candidate supports this in addition to Vista upgrades. If you don't want to do either, and would rather install the RC build over your beta copy of Windows 7, you'll need to modify an ini file in order to get everything working, just don't complain if you run into quirks once you've got the RC installed.

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsart … chid=21492