I just went through the upgrade process on the two computers that I have running W7 at home.  One being my media PC in my bedroom and one being my media server.

It worked perfectly!

The first step was to manually edit a file to be able to do the update.  Before you go blasting Microsoft for making this a manual hack, they have a very decent reason for doing this.  According to my brother, a former MS employee, it is done because there will be no one that upgrades from a beta to a release candidate once Windows 7 goes live.   And isn’t that the point of a beta?  To test it out and find any bugs?   The bugs in a beta-to-release candidate upgrade will be different than the bugs in a fresh install of a release candidate.  They allow an upgrade from Vista, because they anticipate people upgrading from Vista to W7 when it launches so any bugs there need to be worked out.   So to get to the point – if you upgrade from Windows 7 beta to Windows 7 release candidate, your feedback will become pointless to Microsoft and won’t help the process.

Still want to do it?  There are a few different ways you can achieve this, and they all work.  I’ll walk you through the process that I took, because I didn’t want to burn any extra DVDs if I didn’t have to.

OK, first step as I said before is to manually edit a file.  But you can’t edit an ISO without extracting it first.   Because it’s a bootable ISO, your normal ISO extracting tool (PowerArchiver for me) may not be able to extract it properly as it would a different ISO.   But you can mount it and see everything.   My image mounting tool of choice is VirtualCD, but you can use the freeware Daemon Tools to do this as well.  Once mounted, copy all the files to your local hard drive under a single folder.

Then browse to the “Source” folder and look for “cversion.ini”.   Right-click on the file to open it in a text editor of your choice.  For me, that’s the freeware Notepad++.

Once it’s open, you’ll see something similar to below:

[HostBuild]
MinClient=7077.0
MinServer=7000.0

Change the MinClient to read 7000.0.   Build 7000 is the build number for the Windows 7 beta.  Close and save your cversion.ini file to overwrite the version there before.

The next step is to burn the install DVD.   You can do this in your preferred DVD burner tool, just make sure that when you do you make it bootable.   When I did this, I actually re-created the ISO so that I could use my burning tool to burn the image and I could store the edited ISO for future use if necessary.

My process was to open up MagicISO and go to “File > New > Bootable CD/DVD Project”.  It’ll ask for a bootable image file.  Browse to the folder you copied everything to and select the “bootmgr” file in the root directory of the Windows 7 RC install folder.   Then select everything in MagicISO and drag it into your new ISO file.   I renamed the ISO to the folder name (GRC1CULFRER_EN_DVD), but I don’t know if that’s necessary or not because I didn’t try it any other way.

Save off your ISO, then when it’s done open up your burning tool of choice – for me it’s the freeware InfraRecorder – and burn the image to a DVD.

From here, simply pop the DVD into the tray and open up Setup.exe in your computer running Windows 7 and it will walk you through the install.   On my media computer (2.4 GHz/1 GB of RAM) it took about an hour to install Windows 7 RC1.  After the initial license agreements and such it doesn’t require you to do anything…which is awesome in my book!

On a final note, the one thing that did change I noticed was that I had to re-setup my DWL-G820 gaming adapter that is providing wireless internet to my media computer in the bedroom.  The process is extremely simple but can sound intimidating if you’re new to networking:

• Right-click on your network in the system tray and go to “Open Network and Sharing Center”
• Look for “Connections” and click the blue link of your connection – for me, it’s “Intel LAN” because my network card is an Intel one.
• Click the “Properties” button
• Select “Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)” and click the “Properties” button
• Choose the option for “Use the following IP address” and type in 192.168.0.51 into the “IP address:” field.
  • The Subnet mask will automatically fill in with 255.255.255.0, that is perfectly normal
• Choose “Use the following DNS server addresses”, but don’t fill anything else in to any of the boxes.
• Click “OK” out of all the boxes until you are back to your Network and Sharing Center screen.
• Open up IE and type into the address bar the IP address 192.168.0.35
• A box will pop up asking you to log in.  By default, the username is “admin” and there is no password.
  • If no box pops up, try holding down reset on your adapter for at least thirty seconds…I tried to do it for a couple seconds and it didn’t reset.
• Walk through the wizard on the screen
• Now your gaming adapter is connected to your wireless network, but the computer isn’t using the adapter as a network device.
• Go back to your Network and Sharing Center and click on your connection again.
• Click on “Properties” again.
• Again select “Internet Protocol Version 4” and click “Properties”
• Change the setting from “Use the following IP address” to “Obtain an IP address automatically”.
• Change the setting at the bottom to “Obtain DNS server address automatically”.
• Click “OK” until you’re back to your Network and Sharing Center screen and you should see it connecting to your network!
• Get yourself a drink.  Congratulations!

Enjoy Windows 7 RC1 wirelessly!