Thread: Windows 7 "Beta" RC

Anyone else using windows 7 beta RC?
Can you just purchase a valid serial # and keep on surfing without having to do a clean install?
RC is coming to an abrupt halt soon & I need to take action quick. Any thoughts or ideas are appreciated. I just don't want to do a clean install, but will if it is necessary.

I personally wouldn't mess around with an upgrade attempt and just do the clean install. It takes a little longer, but is the safest route.

If you want to try upgrading though, there are guides around the net to try and walk you through it. It's not an automatic process and some manual work-arounds are involved...


http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/upgrade_04.asp

I did the "upgrade" on one of my machines. It looked like it worked, but it took quite a bit of finagling as it kept erroring out saying I couldn't do a 32bit upgrade from a 64 bit system eventhough I was installing the 64bit edition. It became more of a challenge to make it work. I am going to just wipe it clean though as I keep getting IE errors and other annoyances.

On my other system I said screw it, backed up my info and just did a clean install, much easier

I'm an MSDN subscriber so I was able to upgrade from Windows 7 Ultimate RC x64 to Windows 7 Ultimate GM x64 pretty easily. I just edited that one ini file and everything went fine. The only problem was that my VMWare network adapters were deleted, and the VMWare networking services were disabled. Since I was upgrading to VMWare Workstation 7 anyway, I just removed Workstation 6 and installed the new version, and everything was fine. Other than VMWare, I've had zero issues, but again, I was going Ultimate x64 to Ultimate x64. Any upgrade path where the versions are not identical is probably going to have problems.

One major issue with the 64bit version is there is no adobe flashplayer10 for Win7 so you have to run in 32 bit mode if you want flash, and this is a critical app as most web sites have some flash in them.

Originally Posted by joncl

One major issue with the 64bit version is there is no adobe flashplayer10 for Win7 so you have to run in 32 bit mode if you want flash, and this is a critical app as most web sites have some flash in them.

I don't believe this is a major issue for most people.

I don't think I've ever launched the 64-bit version of IE on my 64-bit machines (the default is the 32-bit version), and AFAIK, every other browser is 32-bit, so I don't think many people are running into this.

Why do you need to run a 64-bit browser?

Originally Posted by BuddyBoy

I don't believe this is a major issue for most people.

I don't think I've ever launched the 64-bit version of IE on my 64-bit machines (the default is the 32-bit version), and AFAIK, every other browser is 32-bit, so I don't think many people are running into this.

Why do you need to run a 64-bit browser?

Simply look at the overheads running 32bit apps on your 64bit machine even with multiprocessors and say 4gb of ram. Win 7 comes with IE8 64bit and of course firefox has the same.