Windows 7 Release Candidate: start from scratch or upgrade the beta?

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

If you’re one of the millions currently downloading Windows 7 RC, you’re very soon (well, I say very soon – if our experience is anything to go by, you might have completed the download by Thursday week) going to be presented with a dilemma: Perform a clean install or hack the OS and upgrade in place over the beta.

Microsoft’s installation instructions tell a little white lie. “If you’ve installed Windows 7 Beta on your PC, you’ll need to back up your data, and do a clean installation of the RC,” they claim. Not true. That might be what Microsoft wants you to do, but it is perfectly possible to upgrade your beta by following the instructions provided on Microsoft’s own Engineering Windows 7 blog.

Microsoft doesn’t want you to do this, of course, and for perfectly valid reasons. In the real world, when Windows 7 is finally released, few people are going to be upgrading from one version of Windows 7 to another. It wants as many people as possible testing the upgrade process from Vista, not discovering and reporting bugs from one build to another.  

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