OK guys I need some advice from the pro's around here so here's the situation. Some friends of mine are in school and got the student discount on a Win7 upgrade disc so it was amazingly cheap, anyway, we all know you can't upgrade from XP to 7 directly, only from Vista, so upon my suggestion they went out onto the interwebs and downloaded a Vista Ultimate iso with some sort of oem loader built in, figured that would be good enough being as it would only be installed long enough to then upgrade to 7, anyway long story short. The 7 upgrade he bought is Windows 7 Pro, and we just found out you can only upgrade to 7 Pro from Vista Business, so my question.... Is there anyway to simply swap slp keys and have it be business? or will it be more involved, or worse yet not even possible. A thousand thanks to any and all help you guys can throw my way.
I think you can upgrade from XP, but you have to do a custom installation, which is basically a clean install that will erase everything from your computer. So if you can backup all your data and software packages, you could do the custom install without having to install vista. Hope that helps.
well that really doesn't help very much as it wouldn't be an "upgrade" install then would it, the point of an upgrade install is to be non destructive, that would be a clean install. Well I'm guessing from the general lack of suggestions of a constructive nature that getting this Ultimate switched to Business non destructively is not going to be possible.
If you look in the Windows 7 forums you will find a tool to delete the ei.cfg file on the 7 ISO which allows the choice of versions during install. You need to make an iso file of the 7 install disk, delete the ei.cfg file using the tool you find on the site. Then you could upgrade from Vista Ultimate to 7 Ultimate and use a loader from the 7 forums. PS - an upgrade is a terrible idea because despite what M$ say there are incompatibility issues - AND by the way an Upgrade disk will clean install - the difference is in the key not the disk. With a loader you don't install a key during install - it installs an OEM one for you. PPS - you can always shrink your disk and install 7 to a clean partition and dual boot with XP. I'd do the ei.cfg thing anyway as then you have a full install 7 disk.
you can't upgrade from XP to Windows 7 also your upgrade DVD is basicly retail you need to activate online.
For any and all interested, the link in my previous post does work for Vista also, so in case your in the same situation as my friends were by needing to upgrade (clean install not an option) from Vista Ultimate to 7 Pro, you can change the EditionID and ProductName as shown in the link to "Business" and it will upgrade just fine.