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!

So this weekend I decided to investigate and attempt to solve the problem.

Here's how my network was configured

As you can see in the image above, my network was pretty ordinary. Cable modem (internet) connected to my Linksys WRT160N Wireless Router. From there, everything was connected. The Xbox 360 (through a D-Link DWL-G820), the Wii, all our desktop computers and both Crystal and my notebooks. The numbers on the image represent the number of computers that have access to the network (although not all of those get used with the same frequency).

I was having issues with my 360 kicking me offline randomly. That especially is bad in the middle of a fire fight on Call of Duty: World at War. I was browsing on the web and stumbled across this page. What he says there makes sense, and I had an old wireless router that actually had been replaced because of the same problem — it kicked me off the wireless network randomly. So I thought I would give it a shot.

This is what my network looks like now

Although I’ve only had it like that for one day, it’s been one day of not getting knocked offline. And that’s good. The only thing different that I did from what Mr. Ludington suggested was to flip the IPs. So my “Router A”, the Linksys WRT160N is actually at .254 and the Dell TrueMobile 2300 is at .1. The reason for that is because the TrueMobile won’t let me change the IP address from anything but .1 whereas the WRT160N (a much nicer router) will let me change it to whatever I want.

I had a little bit of issues getting the WPA code to enter on the Xbox. The problem was that the DWL-G820 recognized my wireless network as a WEP network. But it’s not, so I had to enter everything manually for my wireless network.

To do that, on your Xbox dashboard, go to My Xbox > System Settings > Network Settings > Configure Network and then click on the first option there for your wireless network. If you don’t see your Xbox in wireless mode, then chances are your wireless adapter isn’t hooked up right. Once you click on the Wireless Mode, go to Scan for Networks. You can cancel the scan right away if you don’t want to wait for your wireless adapter to look for networks (cancel by hitting X). You’ll see an option called Specify Unlisted Network. If you let your wireless adapter scan for networks, you may need to scroll to the bottom of the resulting available wireless networks to see it. Depends on how many neighbors you have with wireless. Once you’re in the Specify Unlisted Network screen, you can enter your network’s SSID and then you can choose WPA security and enter your wireless network’s keyphrase. And that’s all there is to it! Happy networking!

Stardock announced today the Gamers Bill of Rights: a statement of principles that it hopes will encourage the PC game industry to adopt standards that are more supportive of PC gamers. The document contains 10 specific rights that video game enthusiasts can expect from Stardock as an independent developer and publisher that it hopes that other publishers will embrace. The Bill of Rights is featured on Stardocks website (www.stardock.com) and is on prominent display in Stardocks booth (1142) at the Penny Arcade Expo.

“As an industry, we need to begin setting some basic, common sense standards that reward PC gamers for purchasing our games,” stated Brad Wardell, president and CEO of Stardock Corporation. “The console market effectively already has something like this in that its games have to go through the platform maker such as Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony. But on the PC, publishers can release games that are scarcely completed, poorly supported, and full of intrusive copy protection and then be stuck on it.”

Chris Taylor, CEO and founder of Gas Powered Games stated, “This is an awesome framework for the industry to aspire to, and ultimately so that we can provide our customers with the gaming experience that they have wanted for years, and really deserve.”

As an example of The Gamers Bill of Rights in action, Stardock instituted a policy of allowing users to return copies of The Political Machine purchased at retail to Stardock for a full refund if they found that their PC wasnt sufficient to run the game adequately.

“The PC market loses out on a lot of sales because a significant percentage of our market has PCs that may or may not be adequate to run our games. Without the ability to return games to the publisher for a refund, many potential buyers simply pass on games they might otherwise have bought due to the risk of not being certain a game will work on their PC. The average consumer doesnt know what pixel shader 2.0 support means, for instance,” said Wardell.

According to Stardock, the objective of the Gamers Bill of Rights is to increase the confidence of consumers of the quality of PC games which in turn will lead to more sales and a better gaming experience.

The Gamers Bill of Rights:

1. Gamers shall have the right to return games that don’t work with their computers for a full refund.
2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
3. Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a games release.
4. Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
5. Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
6. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games wont install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent.
7. Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
8. Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
9. Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
10. Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.

For more information about Stardocks games and software, please visit www.stardock.com.

About Stardock Stardock is one of the worlds leading developers and publishers of PC games and desktop software. Its PC games include the upcoming strategy/RPG combo, Demigod as well as Sins of a Solar Empire, the highest rated and best selling PC strategy game of 2008 as well as the critically acclaimed Galactic Civilizations series. Its desktop software includes Object Desktop, WindowBlinds, and a host of other programs for customizing the Windows experience. Learn more about Stardock by visiting www.stardock.com.

Stardock.com – Your Edge In Software