Anytime what?!

It’s late October 2009, or maybe later: You have your new Windows 7 installation in your computer and you’ve already seen the benefits gained by upgrading to 7. You bought the Home Premium edition because you were told that’s all you needed, or maybe that’s all you could afford at the time. Now need more: Now you want the XP Mode and the Network Domain Support feature of the Professional edition, also you’ve decided that you’d like to be able to use the Bitlocker Drive Encryption feature of the Ultimate edition too.

- But you bought Home Premium. You just don’t want to face the prospect of having to reinstall the OS or go through the palaver of buying a new disc, with all the associated time and expense added to your computer’s downtime while you upgrade…

You’re in luck; because with Windows 7’s Anytime Upgrade, you can upgrade to a higher version of Windows 7 instantly without having to reinstall any software, lose any files, or anything like that.

All you need to do is to buy a new license key. You can upgrade Home Premium to Professional or to Ultimate, and you can upgrade Professional to Ultimate in this way also.

FINANCIAL-PITFALL WARNING: 

Upgrading from Home Premium to Professional, then from Professional to Ultimate  will incur extra unnecessary expense: To upgrade from Home Premium to Ultimate costs £125GBP, while to upgrade from Home Premium to Professional costs £120 GBP, and then from Professional to Ultimate a further £85 GBP. Resultant extra expense = £80GBP.

Why can you do this with 7 but not with Vista?

The short answer: Vista was/is crap. – And that’s all you get on that question.

OK. How do they manage to work this upgrade thingy?

When you buy a Windows 7 disc, you buy all the files, the Ultimate edition in other words, but when you enter your licence key, it tells the installer which edition you actually paid for, and, unless you actually paid for Ultimate and received and entered a corresponding licence key, the installer will lock out some of the features, corresponding to which version your licence key says that you bought. – Easy really isn’t it?

They should have done this with Vista; but Vista was a mess from day 1: It had a hotch-potch of different versions that weren’t directly upgradable to the next version up: For instance, every version of Vista except for the Business version had Media Center built in…

So how would I go about performing this Anytime Upgrade?

OK; first click on the Start thingy (You’ll always get the best technical terms on this blog.) and type “Upgrade” into the Search… thingy. (This is becoming a habit.) Select “Windows Anytime Upgrade”, and follow the prompts from there. It’s fairly simple. – Just that you need to know where to start; and, as usual, Microsoft appear to have kindly buried the starting-post again.

I apologise that this article is a bit vague towards the end; but this sort of information wasn’t that easy to get hold of at the time of writing. As a little compensation I’ll reveal to you the pricings for Windows 7 in the UK: -

Home Premium has an upgrade price of £80GBP and a retail price of £150GBP.

You save £70GBP by upgrading from XP or Vista.

Professional has an upgrade price of £190GBP and a retail price of £220GBP.

You save £30GBP by upgrading from XP or Vista.

Ultimate has an upgrade price of £200GBP and a retail price of £230GBP.

You save £30GBP by upgrading from XP or Vista.

I can see that Microsoft’s crazy pricing technique here is put in place to stop people from working the system: For instance; if you were to get Home Premium at its upgrade price of £80, it would cost you £5 extra to then upgrade to Ultimate than it would to have bought Ultimate at its upgrade price in the first place. If I remember correctly; Microsoft have been caught out like that before, and aren’t going to let it happen a second time.

- Do you think this pricing is fair? How does it compare to the pricing of Vista in your opinion? Please comment.