First attempt failed with good old Error 0×80070017 which I fixed by downloading a second time and then burning a DVD-R (not a DVD-RW!) more slowly at 4x speed.

Second attempt – a clean install – failed with “This version of Windows could not be installed” which led me to hunt down the whole Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional upgrade nightmare which you folks have so admirably documented and worked around in this thread.

Third attempt succeeded thanks to you all, although it does take a while as someone warned, and with the huge huge benefit of an upgrade over a custom install of not having to reinstall all those pesky applications.

Cheers!
mick

1. Click on start button and type “regedit” into the search box at the bottom of the window. Then, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version

2. Change the key “EditionID” to “Business” (mine was “HomePremium”).

3. Change the “ProductName” to “Business” (mine was “Windows Vista (TM) Home Premium”, replace the entire entry with the word “Business”).

That’s it. Now, insert the Windows 7 Professional Upgrade DVD into your disk drive and follow the prompts to upgrade.

In my case, I was sure something was wrong initially because it seemed like it took a long time while “checking compatibility.” But I just let it go and it finally finished that compatibility check and prompted me to move on with the rest of the install. It took about 1 1/2 hours from that point to complete the process. All of my existing programs and data were there when I was done and I’m now running Windows 7 Professional without any issues.

One standard word of caution, it is always a good idea to backup your registry before editing it using regedit. You can do this by creating a restore point before proceeding with step 1 above.

Thanks so much, Jim

1) ran regedit as instructed
- changed ‘EditionID’ to ‘Business’
- changed ‘Product Name’ to ‘Windows Vista (TM) Business’

2) WITHOUT rebooting, inserted DVD and ran setup, selecting Upgrade

3) 2-3 hours later, done!

If you do restart your computer with the new “business” edition ID, does it screw up anything??? Thanks in advance. I ust ordered by student version of Win 7 Pro and will be updating in the next few days.

One other note, I was given the Win7 disk already on a USB stick, as I do not have a DVD drive on my Vaio. I’m not very technical, but it looks to me like the files have simply been copied on there from the disk. In any case, I was able to simply go into the Source folder and delete (well, in my case I moved – just in case) the ei.cfg file. This allowed me to chose the version I wanted to upgrade to. (Not strictly necessary post-regedit, but nice to have the option in case one ever needs a Win7 disk for recovery.)

I was able to upgrade straight to Pro, no problems. I’m glad there are those of you out there willing and able to got the long route, so that someone could eventually shorten it and make it easy for us less than worthy non-techies. Thanks all!