Microsoft Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade [Home Premium to Professional]

Windows 7 Professional includes all the Home Premium features you love and the business features your work demands. Connect to company networks easily and more securely and share files across the various PCs in your home. In addition, you can run many Windows XP productivity programs in Windows XP Mode and recover your data easily with automatic back-ups to your home or business network.

Product Features
- Move up to Windows 7 Professional from Windows 7 Home Premium with Windows Anytime Upgrade
- Watch, pause, rewind, and record TV on your PC
- Easily create a home network and connect your PCs to a printer with HomeGroup
- Run many Windows XP productivity programs in Windows XP Mode
- Connect to company networks easily and more securely with Domain Join

Microsoft Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade [Home Premium to Professional] Reviews:

Most laptops/notebooks seem to ship with Windows 7 Home Premium rather than Windows 7 Professional. That is probably fine for most users. However, if you need your Windows 7 Notebook to be part of a business domain network, you need Windows 7 Professional. This upgrade is how you accomplish the change.

It turns out that Windows 7 Home Premium already contains Windows 7 Professional; it is simply not enabled. When you buy this upgrade you are getting an upgrade key. No disk, just a key sticker and very brief instructions. Key it in pursuant to the laughably simple instructions and within minutes you will be running Windows 7 Professional. One caveat: apparently you cannot upgrade from Windows 7 32 to Windows 7 64 bit. This will affect very few users as I do not believe that hardly any computers are shipping with 32 bit Windows 7. Nor should they. Windows 7 64 bit is very compatible with existing 32 bit software, and in the future we can expect lots of 64 bit software and we all want to be ready for it.

I don’t see much commentary here about the actual product performance. There is a lot of confusion about this upgrade in the retail outlets, so I thought I’d explain to those with questions.

I researched Windows 7 before I bought my computer, and knew I wanted Win 7 Professional in case I wanted to run XP programs. Most retail outlets only had Win 7 Home Premium installed on their computers. The computer stores had the Win 7 Pro computers on backorder. Through some investigation at Microsoft, I found out that all versions of Win 7 are preinstalled, and you just need to get a key to “unlock” the higher versions. This is that key.

It took a total of 14 minutes to install this upgrade on my new computer. The hardest part was typing in the multi-digit key. (In other words, not hard!) It ran for 12 minutes, and then it was ready to go!