Upgrade (or Downgrade) Windows 7 Ultimate or Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional or Windows 7 Home 36

This entry was posted in Reference Technology Windows and tagged Downgrade downgrade to lower version Hack MinClient=7077.0 MinClient=7233.0 Upgrade upgrade to lower version Windows 7 Windows 7 Professional Windows 7 Ultimate Windows Home Basic Windows Home Premium Windows Vista Ultimate on by (updated 3993 days ago)

If you’re an “ultimate” geek running an “Ultimate” edition of Windows (such as Windows Vista Ultimate or Windows 7 Ultimate), but you want to upgrade or downgrade to Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Home Premium, or Windows 7 Home Basic, you’ve got a problem: the Windows 7 installer won’t allow you do an upgrade (or downgrade) to a “lower” version of Windows 7.

If you attempt it, you’ll receive an error message like this:

Microsoft has declared that you can only upgrade from Pro-to-Pro or Ultimate-to-Ultimate, meaning if you want to go from Vista or Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 Pro or Windows 7 Home Premium, you have to do a fresh install, thereby losing  all your settings, favorites, installed programs, etc.

In my case, I was trying to upgrade my wife’s computer from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional. But it’s also as big problem for anyone who ran a beta or pre-release versions of Windows 7, which only came in the Ultimate flavor.

But, of course, there’s a hack.

You can trick the Windows 7 installer into thinking that you’ve actually got a lower edition installed, which will then allow the upgrade to proceed. Here’s how:

  • Open the Registry Editor (run regedit.exe).
  • Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

  • Now you need to change the EditionID and ProductName keys to a lower edition of Windows.
  • To upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional, change the EditionID from Ultimate to Business, and the ProductName from Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate to Windows 7 Business. You read that right – even though you’re running Windows Vista, you can trick it into thinking you’re running a version of Windows 7 that is eligible for upgrade.
  • To downgrade from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional, change the EditionID from Ultimate to Professional, and the ProductName from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional.
  • To downgrade from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 Home Premium, change the EditionID from Ultimate to HOMEPREMIUM, and the ProductName from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 HOMEPREMIUM.
  • To downgrade from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 Home Basic, change the EditionID from Ultimate to HOMEBASIC, and the ProductName from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 7 HOMEBASIC.
  • Run setup.exe from the Windows 7 DVD (don’t boot from the DVD).
  • Choose the Upgrade option when prompted.

 If you’re trying to “downgrade” from the Windows 7 Ultimate Release Candidate (Build 7100), you have to jump through a few additional hoops:

  • Copy the contents of the install DVD to a new folder on your hard drive.
  • Locate the cversion.ini file in the Sources sub-folder, double-click it to open in Notepad, then change MinClient=7233.0 to MinClient=7077.0
  •  Run setup.exe from the folder on your hard drive, and choose the Upgrade option.
  • When the upgrade is complete, you can delete the folder.

Keep in mind that in all of the above cases, you’ll need to re-activate your copy of Windows with the new Product Key once the upgrade is complete.

Happy upgrading or downgrading!

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