Upgrading from Windows 7 RC

Are you somebody who has been running the Windows 7 RC until its last gasp like me? Were you troubled to find out that you can't upgrade from the RC to a release copy of Windows 7? Well, here's a site explaining how to talk the release version into upgrading a RC machine. This saved me several hours this weekend as well a probable trip onsite to get domain & admin stuff sorted out. (And a hat tip to Lifehacker, where I saw the link.)

If you did go read that you might be shaking your head to yourself and going "it can't be that easy". It is - I just finished the upgrade and everything is working fine. I had to reinstall some system-level tools - the VMWare Fusion tools and the Cisco VPN client but after that it looks great.

The reason you can't upgrade Windows 7 RC to a legitimate purchased copy of Windows 7 is that there's a text file listing a minimum version number that blocks it. Edit that text file to include the RC version number (7100) and there's no problem at all. Microsoft deliberately chose to screw over the RC users.

Note that even as it was it took several hours to install. I bought a legal copy of the software, my RC install was completely patched. It really should have been a simple "Oh OK here's a legitimate license key that I paid for. We cool?" five minute thing. Really the whole mess is just hostile. Fuckin' Microsoft ....