Windows 7 ultimate 7100

Ronnie Vernon. Hi Jim How did you originally activate the RC version? On the next page, you should see the Product Key displayed. The Windows 7 RC is no longer available for download. Hope this helps. Thank You for using Windows 7. Do you know if this will allow one to upgrade downgrade? Sunday, October 25, PM. Hello customer, Please understand that the final release version won't normally install as an upgrade-in-place. How to upgrade from Windows 7 RC to a release version of Windows 7 However, this isn't recommended, or supported, by Microsoft; whether or not to adopt the method is at your own risk.

Monday, October 26, AM. I think MS should had a proper approach allowing the RC users to straight away upgrade to retail versions. Wednesday, February 17, PM.

It was all stated when you signed up to download the RC. It has been beat to death in this forum for days. It is not Microsoft fault that many did not understand this. I wanted to try the Win 7 back up. I ran it last night. I know, I'm a we bit on the late side to be doing that. Just chalk it up to ignorance and let it go at that. Here is what I need to investigate. Win 7 uses I have two drives with a number of partitions but totalling GB. I set Win 7 back-up as recomended-letting windows decide what to back-up.

It's 1 am, the back-up is finished. I've made a Win 7 emergency boot disk. Everything looks good untill i go look at J drive. My back-up is I'm only useing I'm going to do some investigateing but it looks like the 'ol fashioned way is still the best way!

Tags operating system , windows 7. BB code is On. Smilies are On. Trackbacks are On. Pingbacks are On. Refbacks are On. Forum Rules. The time now is AM. Add Thread to del. In Internet Explorer, this will show recently visited Web sites, although it doesn't yet seem to work in Firefox.

If you've noticed the missing Show Desktop icon, that's because it's been baked into the taskbar itself. Mouse over to the right corner. Hovering over the Show Desktop box reveals the desktop, and then hides it when you mouse away. Click on the box to minimize all your programs.

Resizing programs has been simplified and improved by the capability to drag a window's title bar. Drag a program window to the top of your monitor to expand it to full screen. If you want to work in two windows simultaneously, drag one to the left edge and one to the right edge of your screen, and they'll automatically resize to half the width of your monitor.

Dragging a program away from the top or sides will return it to its original size. Theme packages also make it much faster to change the look of Windows 7.

From the Control Panel, you can change the theme under Appearance and Personalization. Microsoft has created several theme packages to give people a taste for what the feature can do. Click on one to download it, and it instantly changes the color scheme and background--no need to reboot. Users can create their own themes, as well. Windows Media Player and Device Stage One of the biggest new features makes Windows Media Player useful again: you can now stream media files from one Windows 7 computer to another, across the Internet and out of network.

Even better, the setup procedure is dead simple. When you open Windows Media Player, there's a new Stream option on the toolbar. Click it, and you're presented with two choices. Both require you to associate your computer with your free Windows Live ID. When you've associated a second Windows 7's WMP with that same ID, you can remotely access the media on the host computer.

Windows Media Player's mini mode looks much slicker, emphasizing the album art--sometimes at the expense of clearly seeing the controls, but it's a definite improvement. The new Device Stage makes managing peripherals significantly easier, combining printers, phones, and portable media players into one window. A large photo of the peripheral summarizes important device stats and makes it easy to identify which devices you're using.

Device Stage can also be used to preset common tasks, such as synchronization. Device Stage support for older devices makes one of Windows 7's best features applicable to peripherals and externals that don't need to be upgraded. One annoying change is that Bluetooth driver support no longer comes baked into the operating system. If you need a Bluetooth driver, you'll either need the installation disc on hand or you'll have to go download it.

Search, touch screens, and XP mode Windows 7's native search feature has been improved. Files added to the hard drive were indexed so fast that they were searchable less than 5 seconds later. Search result snippets now include a longer snippet, and highlight the snippet more clearly. This should appeal specifically to people who juggle large numbers of long documents, but it's a useful feature for anybody who wants to find files faster.

However, the search field is available by default only in the Start menu and in Windows Explorer, and cannot be easily added to the taskbar. Touch-screen features worked surprisingly well. The hardware sometimes misread some of the multitouch gestures, occasionally confusing rotating an image, for example, with zooming in or out of the image.

Overall, though, there were few difficulties in performing the basic series of gestures that Microsoft promotes, and this places Windows 7 in an excellent position for the future, as more and more computers are released with multitouch abilities. Experts and people or companies who hope to use Windows 7 for business situations will appreciate the new XP Mode. It doesn't have much of a practical application for the home consumer, but if you need to access programs designed for Windows XP that have not been upgraded to Windows Vista or 7, XP Mode creates a virtual environment within Windows 7 that should assuage any fears of upgrading without backward compatibility.

It's not easy to set up once you've downloaded the XP Mode installer. You'll need to double-check that you have the right hardware, and can get the right software. Motherboards older than two years probably won't work, and even if you do have a newer one you might have to go into your BIOS and activate Hardware Virtualization.

CPU-identification utilities are available from Microsoft that can tell you if you're in the clear or not. However, if compatibility is the issue, this hassle will be worth it to you. Users will have full access to peripherals connected to their Windows 7 hardware, including printers, and the clipboard can be used to cut and paste between the virtual operating system and the "real" one. Microsoft has tweaked the feature so that it's less intrusive, but it's not clear whether that means you're actually more or less secure than you were in Vista.

UAC was one of the biggest changes in Vista. It tightened program access, but did it in such a way as to frustrate many owners of single-user computers.

Windows 7 provides more options for user customization of UAC.