WARNING: What we have here is a licensing question…
Question 3:
“How do I upgrade an OEM copy of Vista Home Basic or Premium to Vista Ultimate edition?”
The easiest way to do this is to take advantage of the “Anytime Upgrade”. You can purchase an upgrade online.
“But what if I want to go from OEM to Full-Packaged-Product?”
Unfortunately that’s not an upgrade path that is allowed. The upgrade only upgrades an OEM license to OEM, and a FPP to FPP. So to do that will require you to do a fresh install. (Not as bad as it sounds, if you consider that a fresh install doesn’t need to nuke your hard disk.. but will save your documents into a “windows.old” folder, where you can later restore them from later. It’s still strongly recommended that you do a backup of your files prior to your installation, of course, but having them there makes it a little easier.)
And on a related note – another question I had was about the Windows Vista software that we gave out at the event…
“You gave us a DVD with 32-bit Windows Vista Ultimate, with a key that we can retrieve online to install and activate it. THANK YOU! ..but, I really want to test the 64-bit instead! Ordinarily you get both 32-bit and 64-bit software, with one key, when you buy Vista Ultimate Edition. If I already have, or can borrow the DVD media for Vista Ultimate SP1 x64, will the key you gave me work?”
Good news: The answer is YES. If you have a friend with a Windows Vista SP1 x64 disk (SP1 version only – it won’t work with RTM), then you can install and activate it using the key you acquire online.
—
Wanna come to a TechNet Event? We’d love to see you there!
EVENT ATTENDEES: Don’t forget that I’ve posted the resource links as well as the attached .zip file containing the PowerShell Demo Sample on my Resource Page HERE.
Absolutely Full of I.T. 