Win7 pro upgrade over Win7 home

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   I just wanted to advise everyone of a nightmare. I bought my wife a brand new Sony Vaio laptop, gaming capable, from Best Buy, plus all the extra goodies she wanted. For me I bought and upgrade from what it came with Win7 home premium to Win7 home pro. Why, just because I'm running pro on our old desktop and my DS rig is coming with pro installed. So, it was no problem upgrading it from home to pro, everything went like glass, so I thought awesome, glad to get that over, imaged with Acronis, then installed her programs then imaged again. 
  Then the day came to activate Win7, I entered the code and clicked activate over the internet and it slapped back with, you are using an illegal version of Win7. I've been sick sick with bronchitis the past 2 weeks and we're both disabled, my wife more than I but being the trooper she is she went and sat at Best Buys geek squad counter for over 2 hours while they fiddled with uninstalling and re-installing and trying to work out the problem. She brought it back and it still wouldn't activate, I found a phone number on the MS Win7 website and called it for activation, they we're India all 3 times and at we'd get to a certain point and then I'd hear click and the dial tone. Hmm, wonder where it says to hang up in their scipt? Gave up that day, called Best Buy, gave them hell for making wife hang around to end up without a solution they ended by saying, sorry sir it's Microsoft's problem, not ours.
  So next day, had breakfast and called MS told them of what was going on and got a nice lady named Ruby to help me out. First thing she said was "you can't upgrade a version of Win7 over another version of Win7", sure enough on the spine of the box it says Upgrade designed for Win Vista. Ok, if you're not supposed to do it why did the software let me? She agreed and said ok, lets look at this problem. To make it short she took control over the laptop and over 1 1/2 hours she did things and I did things and eventually we got it to activate. My immediate question was if the system fails and I have to re-install will I have to do this again. No sir, once you've activated Win7 puts a code on the root of the hard drive and you don't have to activate again. 
  Keeping it short again, I tried to load some things from our desktop onto an external drive and put them on the laptop using Acronis True Image 2010. My experience with version 11.8 of that same program let me copy and paste from the image the things that I wanted but I found out with 2010 it doesn't let you do this, but it didn't tell me so, it just went ahead and let me belive it was copying only the things I wanted. instead it copied the desktop programs over the laptop system and corrupted windows. I tried a few things to try and restore from a 2010 image of the laptop and it didn't work. I finally gave up and did a re-install of Win7 all over again. I instantly went to the validate thing, it asked for the program code and I entered it, it said it was checking with MS then it stopped and notified me that it was validated. I guess if I ever have to replace the hard drive I'll have to install winXP then Win7.
  .....thought you'd like to know

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BriSleep Members Profile Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Groupie Joined: 26 Oct 2009 Online Status: Offline Posts: 171	Quote Reply Topic: Win7 pro upgrade over Win7 home Posted: 14 Nov 2009 at 4:11pm
	I just wanted to advise everyone of a nightmare. I bought my wife a brand new Sony Vaio laptop, gaming capable, from Best Buy, plus all the extra goodies she wanted. For me I bought and upgrade from what it came with Win7 home premium to Win7 home pro. Why, just because I'm running pro on our old desktop and my DS rig is coming with pro installed. So, it was no problem upgrading it from home to pro, everything went like glass, so I thought awesome, glad to get that over, imaged with Acronis, then installed her programs then imaged again. Then the day came to activate Win7, I entered the code and clicked activate over the internet and it slapped back with, you are using an illegal version of Win7. I've been sick sick with bronchitis the past 2 weeks and we're both disabled, my wife more than I but being the trooper she is she went and sat at Best Buys geek squad counter for over 2 hours while they fiddled with uninstalling and re-installing and trying to work out the problem. She brought it back and it still wouldn't activate, I found a phone number on the MS Win7 website and called it for activation, they we're India all 3 times and at we'd get to a certain point and then I'd hear click and the dial tone. Hmm, wonder where it says to hang up in their scipt? Gave up that day, called Best Buy, gave them hell for making wife hang around to end up without a solution they ended by saying, sorry sir it's Microsoft's problem, not ours. So next day, had breakfast and called MS told them of what was going on and got a nice lady named Ruby to help me out. First thing she said was "you can't upgrade a version of Win7 over another version of Win7", sure enough on the spine of the box it says Upgrade designed for Win Vista. Ok, if you're not supposed to do it why did the software let me? She agreed and said ok, lets look at this problem. To make it short she took control over the laptop and over 1 1/2 hours she did things and I did things and eventually we got it to activate. My immediate question was if the system fails and I have to re-install will I have to do this again. No sir, once you've activated Win7 puts a code on the root of the hard drive and you don't have to activate again. Keeping it short again, I tried to load some things from our desktop onto an external drive and put them on the laptop using Acronis True Image 2010. My experience with version 11.8 of that same program let me copy and paste from the image the things that I wanted but I found out with 2010 it doesn't let you do this, but it didn't tell me so, it just went ahead and let me belive it was copying only the things I wanted. instead it copied the desktop programs over the laptop system and corrupted windows. I tried a few things to try and restore from a 2010 image of the laptop and it didn't work. I finally gave up and did a re-install of Win7 all over again. I instantly went to the validate thing, it asked for the program code and I entered it, it said it was checking with MS then it stopped and notified me that it was validated. I guess if I ever have to replace the hard drive I'll have to install winXP then Win7. .....thought you'd like to know

DST4ME Members Profile Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List DS ELITE Joined: 14 Apr 2008 Online Status: Offline Posts: 36758	Quote Reply Posted: 14 Nov 2009 at 5:53pm
	Always use the clone feature of acronis, imaging is not as reliable. I don't believe you can upgrade home to pro like that, you can upgrade pro vista to pro win7. Edited by DST4ME - 14 Nov 2009 at 5:54pm
	Nvidia Drivers----AMD Drivers

Jingping Members Profile Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Groupie Joined: 11 Sep 2007 Online Status: Offline Posts: 193	Quote Reply Posted: 14 Nov 2009 at 7:38pm
	You can't upgrade used the boxed copy; what you would need to do would be to use the 'Windows Anytime Upgrade' feature in your version of Windows 7.

BriSleep Members Profile Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Groupie Joined: 26 Oct 2009 Online Status: Offline Posts: 171	Quote Reply Posted: 14 Nov 2009 at 8:55pm
	Yep, that's what Best Buy said, use the windows anytime upgrade feature, so I did that and then when the verification came that's when it all went down the tubes. The MS rep just said you can't do it, one Win7 over another but she got us verified anyway and not things are humming along.

Win7 pro upgrade over Win7 home

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