Microsoft urges testers to upgrade to Windows 7 RC from Vista

In anticipation of the upcoming public release of Windows 7 RC suspected to be out in May, Microsoft released a post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog yesterday urging beta testers to switch back to Windows Vista before upgrading, or do clean installs. The reason behind this is because Microsoft designed the RC with those kinds of situations in mind since that is how end-users will be installing Windows 7 in the future. Microsoft wants to avoid seeing build-to-build upgrades so they can properly evaluate the upgrade experience.

As an extended member of the development team and a participant in the Beta program that has helped us so much, we want to ask that you experience real-world setup and provide us real-world telemetry.

Microsoft states that build-to-build upgrades are the source of nearly all problems or instabilities seen with the unreleased builds.

The publicly released Windows 7 Release Candidate in May will not allow a build-to-build upgrade. However, the option can be enabled through a text-file edit if users really do feel they need to perform an upgrade installation. Please note that upgrade installations are generally not recommended by most people and are considered a taboo by IT Professionals due to the potential for instabilities to arise.

If you really feel you must do an upgrade installation, Microsoft provided instructions on how to do so with the RC image:

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

The same process will be required for an RC to RTM upgrade installation.

We’re working hard to provide the highest quality release we can and so we’d like to make sure for this final phase of testing we’re supporting the most real world scenarios possible, which incremental build to build upgrades are not. At the same time everyone on the beta has been so great we wanted to make sure we at least offered an opportunity to make your own expert and informed choice about how to handle the upgrade.

Microsoft relies on data gathered during its pre-release builds to improve on Windows 7 and make it a great final product. I personally will be installing a Vista image and upgrading from there to assist with the beta process. I also encourage you as beta testers to do the same, if possible, to help Microsoft with provide a quality release for Windows 7.

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. Read the rest at windows7center.com.