Windows 7 Release Candidate Installs to Expire Soon

[Rob Williams]

I am not too sure that the number of people still running the Windows 7 RC is that high, but if you happen to be, take note. On February 15th, RC installs will begin receiving messages that remind the user that as of March 1st, the PC will begin its bi-hourly automatic shutdown. That's right... bi-hourly. These shutdowns will continue from that point straight through until June 1st.

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You can read the rest of our news post here.

 

[flashive]

Upgrading is still possible, although not always advised. But since you're probably already doing a backup before reinstalling your computer this might be a plausible option. It comes from the Windows 7 engineering blog. I have used this step in the past to upgrade alpha and beta build to higher versions and it works (not always flawless). I have even upgraded Ultimate to Enterprise and the other way around using similar workarounds. Not supported does not always mean impossible

1. Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
2. Copy the whole image to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the pre-release build).
3. Browse to the sources directory.
4. Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
5. Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000 (pictured below).
6. Save the file in place with the same name.
7. Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/07/delivering-a-quality-upgrade-experience.aspx