Everyday we get a little bit closer to the release candidate for Microsoft’s Windows 7. This will be the last release before the official market release, but beta-testers (free-loaders?) will get to use this pre-market release even after the market release has come out. Perhaps you are one of those, and perhaps you are already on a later “unofficial” release than build 7000, and have simply upgraded from your previous builds. Microsoft is kind of against this.

They say that the upgrade option only really works properly when upgrading from Vista, and that they haven’t spent a lot of time fixing the bugs that result from upgrading from previous builds of Windows 7, because in the real market, they aren’t interested in this. They strongly encourage everyone currently running an early build of Windows 7 who wants to run the RC to either do a clean install or upgrade from Vista. They do however offer a little work-around for those who are really not in the mood for that. I quote the Windows 7 team: “IF YOU REALLY REALLY NEED TO”. Here are 7 easy steps to ignore Microsoft’s warnings of a buggy operating system because you wouldn’t take the time and effort to do a clean install which you feel would actually do your system good.

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.

They also mention something along the lines of “if you don’t backup your entire computer you’re a dumb-ass” and “only download from Microsoft, because uTorrent is the devil”. From this article they do seem to admit that build 7077 is the RC, but when the RC comes out it’ll carry build number 7100. The expected date for the RC is still late May this year. Anyone who’s already got build 7077 from the devil-torrent sites, please share your experiences!