Windows 7 Beta to 7 RC to 7 RTM Upgrade Process

More than a few sites and blogs have posted whiney comments about how difficult the pre-release Windows 7 upgrade process is. Two comments:

1. nonsense; for anyone with any technical skill, the process is simple
2. Microsoft should do what they are doing… spending time getting “real world” upgrade processes in place (i.e. Vista to 7 or XP to 7). While a <>

Here is the 30 minute process:

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/07/delivering-a-quality-upgrade-experience.aspx

1. Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
2. 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.
3. Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
4. Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000 (pictured below).
5. Save the file in place with the same name.
6. Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed.