Upgrading Windows 7 Beta to Windows 7 RC

As you may know, Microsoft doesn’t support upgrading Windows 7 Beta to Windows 7 RC and most likely it won’t support upgrading of Windows 7 RC to Windows 7 final version. It is, however, possible to upgrade the beta version to RC.

To upgrade Windows 7 Beta to Windows 7 RC, follow the procedure described below.

– Copy the source files from Windows 7 RC CD to your local hard drive on your Windows 7 Beta computer.

– Go to the folder where you just copied Windows 7 files.

– In the Sources folder you will see a file called cversion.ini.

– Double-click the cversion.ini file to Open it in Notepad, or use any other text editor.

– The cversion.ini contains the following entries:

[HostBuild]
MinClient=7077
MinServer=7000

Change the first entry (MinClient) 7077 to 7000 so that both the entries will have the same value, as shown below.

[HostBuild]
MinClient=7000
MinServer=7000

If the version has a different value, do the same thing (e.g. change it from 7100 to 7000).

– Save the cversion file in it’s original location (i.e. “Source” folder).

– Run the setup from within Windows 7 Beta. The setup program will use the new value from the cversion.ini file and you should be able to upgrade your Windows 7 Beta to Windows 7 RC.

When the final version of Windows 7 is released, you might want to try the same technique and upgrade from Windows RC to Windows 7 final version.