D-Day for Windows 7 RC approaches

Posted on | February 25, 2010 | No Comments

Well you have been warned.

Microsoft spent much of 2009 testing Windows 7 before officially launching the operating system. And that test involved thousands of beta and release candidate testers, who downloaded pre-release copies of the operating system which they were effectively able to use for free… for a limited time. Now that time is coming to a close.
If you’re still running Windows 7 RC, starting March 1st your PC will shut down automatically every 2 hours. Your work will not be saved. But you can still use the OS, as long as you’re willing to put up with periodic interruptions and reboots. It’ll be kind of like using Windows 98 all over again.
Come June 1st, the OS fully expires. That doesn’t mean it will stop running altogether. But in addition to the automatic shutdown every 2 hours, your desktop background will change to solid black and you’ll have a message on the desktop letting you know the RC has expired. Windows 7 RC will also fail any Windows Genuine Advantage tests at that point, meaning you won’t be able to validate software that requires a "genuine" copy of Windows and you won’t be able to get Windows 7 updates from Microsoft.
You can avoid these issues by replacing Windows 7 RC with another operating system. We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that means Windows XP, a fully licensed copy of Windows 7, or something else altogether. ReactOS, anyone?

Here are the quick text instructions. After the jump you can find detailed (and possibly really boring) screenshots.

Get the MS USB/DVD Download Tools
Put your Windows 7 Utlimate ISO on a USB stick. Note that it must be Ultimate, and that it has to correspond to the one you’ve got installed (x86 or x64).
Edit sources\cversion.ini and change MinClient from 7233.0 to 7100. Save and close.
Install from within Windows so that it upgrades (installing by booting from the USB will give you a fresh install and defeat what we’re trying to do here).

And if you’d like to see the excruciatingly detailed screenshots, keep on reading.

Make sure your USB device is large enough. It actually has to be empty, as I later discovered.

Point the USB/DVD Download Tool at your ISO file. (Must be Windows 7 Ultimate, because the RC was Ultimate).

Click USB device here.

Click Begin copying.

This is where you get the alert if your USB drive isn’t empty. If you get this, select Erase USB Device (obviously, back it up first if you want to).
Now the DVD tool does its thing:

Now go to the USB drive, and sources\cversion.ini. Double-click it to open it in notepad.

Change this:

To this:

Save and close. You can now upgrade your Windows 7 RC with the Final version by installing it from within Windows.