While performing some testing on a Windows 7 Professional workstation running a VL build from MSDN found that a feature I needed was missing – the new Multi-Monitor RDP support. After a little research I found that only the Ultimate and Enterprise editions support this feature; which thanks to Windows 7′s Anytime Upgrade feature I assumed this would be no issue.

But, it was an issue.

It turns out that the build of Windows 7 I was using was missing WindowsAnytimeUpgradeUI.exe and the other related files needed to make the Anytime Upgrade work – and copying the files from another box doesn’t work. It seems this build simply can’t be upgraded in this fashion. So I tried a few other tricks, hoping to find something that would work:

• Reactivate Windows with an Ultimate key; fails with an error indicating that a Professional key is required.
• Run Ultimate edition installer from Windows; fails with this error indicating that you can’t perform edition upgrades.

So being stubborn and determined not to re-install Windows to make this feature work, I started looking for other options. Thanks to a hack for upgrading the RC builds to Final, I found what I needed.

I edited the EditionID and ProductName to reflect Ultimate instead of Professional, rebooted, and then ran the Ultimate installer from within Windows. This time the installer ran without issue and after an hour and a couple reboots it was done. This in-place upgrade/repair procedure allows you to jump to a different edition with fairly little pain. A couple of Windows settings needed to be corrected (primarily display related) and Visual Studio 2010 had to be re-installed, though otherwise everything worked just as it did before.

This is the only method for upgrading these Windows 7 builds that I’ve found, the only other option is to re-install Windows from scratch.

For those that may be running Windows 2000, there’s some things you need to know.

With the change in DST taking effect March 2nd, your Windows 2000 boxes may see some odd behavior. There won’t be Windows Update patch or hot-fix released for this (unless you have an extended support agreement); so there’s some work ahead to keep things running smoothly.

Microsoft has released (read more) a fair bit of information (complete with sample scripts) that can be used to update any 2000 boxes you may have lying around. Those of us that keep 2000 boxes around for testing or even production use will need to make sure they are updated. I can only imagine the odd errors this will cause if these changes aren’t put in place.

This is a bit of an annoyance, I really wish Microsoft would have released this in the form of a Windows Update, though I guess this will probably help drive home the reality that it’s time to upgrade for many users.

For those that do any web development, you’ll be interested to know that the IE Team has released beta 3 of the IE Developer Toolbar. From what I’ve seen, this looks like an impressive release. This is well worth the download and has saved me a fair bit of time in the past.

I installed Vista last night twice; the first was an upgrade from XP Pro on my laptop, the other a fresh install on my desktop. The experience was quite interesting for both; here are a few thoughts about the process:

Laptop 

My laptop has a fairly modest configuration, 1.73GHz Pentium M, 512MB, 80GB hard-drive, and Mobil Intel 915 64MB for the graphics. It’s been running Windows XP Pro, last night I went through the upgrade process to Vista Business. It checking for compatibility it found a couple applications it had issues with, but it seems it wasn’t happy just telling me that they might not work, but they had to be removed before I could go on.

This required exiting setup and uninstalling both Nero and the freshly released Windows PowerShell so that I could continue. Once the offending applications were removed, I started the process again (including the 15 minute compatibility check). From here on, the process went well, although surprisingly slow. From start to first boot into Vista was a bit over three hours.

Once Vista was finally running I had my first taste of Vista, as I had not installed the betas, this was the first time I had used it. The first few minutes were full of disappointing surprises, such as the two INI files adorning my desktop, or the new ‘home’ folder full of permission errors and various configuration files. It’ll take me a fair bit of time to clean my hard drive up from that, it’s really quite a mess. On the upside, pretty much all of my software worked fine, except for the various drivers and utilities to adjust things just as power profiles and wireless network settings, but Vista includes enough to cover the functionality of everything that stopped working.

Impression: Overall positive, it’s a nice operating system, but I’m disappointed in how long it’ll take to get things cleaned up, get the permissions corrected and back to a similar setup to what I had before. 

Desktop

My desktop is a bit more beefy, but still nothing special, it looks something like this: 3.0GHz Pentium 4, 1.0GB of RAM, 80GB system hard-drive (plus a separate data drive), nVidia GeForce MX4000 128MB (PCI) and a ATI Radeon 7000 64MB (AGP). This box was also running XP Pro and had been in need of rebuilding for a couple months at least.

This was a fresh install, and surprisingly quick. I made it to the first boot into Vista in around an hour, a third of the time required for the upgrade. This one went a fair bit smoother than the upgrade process and seems to be a fairly pleasant one. Once the system was up and running, I found the file system to be a fair bit cleaner than the upgrade produced. 

Among the first things I checked was the ‘Experience Index’ to see where my computer ranks, and what the odds would be of getting Aero working. With a grand score of 1.0, I knew that wouldn’t happen. So, I check and sure enough my hunch was right, it was my graphics cards that were to blame. Me being the geek I am, I had to have Aero, so a 10PM run to the local Best Buy, and picked out a ATI Radeon X1600 Pro. I figured this card would have plenty of power for Aero.

Thankfully, Windows was able to identify a driver so I didn’t have to do any searching. All I had to do was reboot, and there was Aero, in all its glory. If you’ve not seen Aero yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. This new shell is great, very different, but really nice.

Impression:  Quite positive, much better than the upgrade. System is stable and almost all of my normal software is working. If you’re going to install Vista, make sure your box has some beef, and start fresh. I’d advise against doing the upgrade, while it does work, it leaves a bit of a mess.

The legendary Robert Scoble has just posted word the Vista may now be gold. It’ll be interesting to see when we get official word. I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t wait till Vista hits the MSDN Subscriber downloads so I can start playing with the final.

The final public beta build (5744) of the next generation of Windows has been released (via shell: revealed). With this announcement it looks like Vista will indeed be on time. For awhile I was wondering if Vista had any chance of making it, but it seems that it will indeed. While this is certainly good news, the RTM build is the one that has my interest.

Playing with a release candidate can be fun, there’s no doubt about it; but the real fun starts when you can see how things work and behave on the final – (hopefully) working build. I’ve got a ton of software to test, and a number of applications to update to take advantage of the latest goodies Vista offers – that’s the fun part.