Submitted by We already more or less confirmed that Microsoft would offer a Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade family pack, with the only missing piece being a more definitive idea on the price. Thanks to a few overeager retailers, we now know that the suggested retail price for the 3-license upgrade pack will be 149 USD, a savings of 210 USD. The family pack is currently not yet available.
Are they limiting these family packs to upgrade editions or do they intend to release a family pack of full install disks as well?
all Editions include a full installation disk, you just need a previous version of windows xp or greater to use the upgrade disks
on a brighter note, i’m glad i bought 3 copies of upgrade instead of waiting for the family pack, since it was the same price
Hopefully you don’t need the original install disk, as most PC’s don’t come with them anymore, and have that damn recovery partition.
With respect to those systems with a rescue and recovery partition, would the Windows 7 “upgrade” be safe in that it would still allow to restore the system using the recovery partition?
Also, a number of users have now grown used to the presence of such rescue and recovery partition and have become dependent on it or if they are skeptical have the option to make a copy on a set of CDs/DVDs. Would the upgrade have an utility to make a rescue & recovery CD/DVD set?
The problem I have with the rescue partition and DVD’s is the fact that there is no option to allow one to pick and choose what to install; in the case of the Toshiba laptop I used to have, you were forced to reinstall the operating system plus all the crapware. If there was an option to select what to restore you would find alot of the anti-restore DVD would die down.
The other problem with the idea of a recovery partition is that it’s completely useless if your hard drive fails and you need to reload, and not all OEMs provide an easy way for most users to create a CD out of it. So if that happens, and they don’t have a disk, they lose basically any way to reload their system if they have a drive failure and replace it. Personally, I think it’s one of the most idiotic ideas to come out of OEM land, but it is a way for them to tell uneducated users that they can only have the hard drive replaced by the OEM and no one else, since only they can put the system back on it.
Yes, if you were simply doing an upgrade from an earlier version your partitions would remain unchanged. Of course, if you used the recovery partition at a later date, you go back to whichever os your system came with initially. If, on the other hand, you do a wipe and install you would have to be careful not to delete the recovery partition or attempt to install Windows 7 overtop of it.
Well, if you say so…
Doubt it. You have to realize exactly what these recovery partitions usually are, they are not usually a custom-mastered Windows installation disk. They are typically a partition image (usually Norton Ghost), and often just enough of an os to be able to restore the image (a minimalist os like FreeDOS). The way they are created is simply by imaging a source installation. If you wanted to you could master your own recovery image with Ghost or a similar tool and replace your system’s stock recovery partition, but obviously doing this requires you to know what you’re doing and is not automatic by any means.
Hey if we’re lucky Microsoft didn’t close the upgrade loophole that was discovered when Vista came out, where you just did an install for the version you bought without putting in a serial number then after you got it installed you ran the setup file to upgrade and then put your serial number in. no need for a previous version.
I know, I know I’m probably dreaming, surely they fixed that one for windows 7.