Now that the installation of Windows 7 RC installed on my Media server is giving me the countdown to death, it’s time to upgrade with a retail copy of Windows 7 Professional. Microsoft doesn’t support upgrading the free Release Candidate version to the retail version, but there is a easy workaround posted at Icrontic. The advantage of doing it this way instead of a ‘clean install’, is that you can keep your installed apps and settings. Another how-to is posted by Colleen of TWiT fame on her site, theV01d.com.
After pondering this for a moment, I decided to just do a clean install. It actually goes quicker than running this hack and I only had a couple programs installed [Boxee and VLC], so re-installing apps was a breeze. I just installed over the old XP partition on my Media box and was up and running. I then deleted the RC partition to free up some space.
