Jonathan's blog

I don’t use Windows much, except on my home media centre. For a while I’ve been running Vista and I’ve generally been impressed with the Media Center application.

I read about Windows 7 and was pleased to hear about the Ultimate Steal protomotion for students (and those with .ac.uk email addresses). The high prices of Vista and of Windows 7 off-the-shelf were a real off-putter for me, but the Ultimate Steal price of £30 for an upgrade seems a reasonable price to me. I’m prepared to pay £30 for a product I will use most days.

So I downloaded the 64-bit upgrade for Windows 7 Home Premium. Unfortunately, I hadn’t bothered to read that it’s not possible to upgrade a 32-bit Vista to a 64-bit Windows 7.

So I converted my DigitalRiver upgrade package to a bootable ISO by following this guide. Booting the Windows 7 installer worked fine – however it rejected my product key. It didn’t give a reason, but I assumed it was because my key covered upgrades only, and not clean installs.

Well, my only choice for using my product key legitimately was to “obtain” a copy of 64-bit Vista from somewhere. I installed Vista Home Premium x64, choosing not to enter a product key and not to activate. I immediately ran the Windows 7 upgrade tool and my product key was accepted. The upgrade took a while but was successful.

What a nuisance!