Dell Windows 7 Upgrade disc can do clean install.

I just received Windows 7 Upgrade Disc from Dell, and it says "Windows Vista Business to Windows 7 Professional Upgrade" on the disc and COA also says "Win Vista Bus to Win 7 Pro UPG Fullfill."

I was curious if it is really impossible to do a clean install with upgrade disc as regular upgrade disc is. (At least I was told that it is impossible), but I did not want to upgrade my notebook to Windows 7 yet.

So, I gave it a try on VMWare. It installed just like regular Windows 7 disc in a empty HDD. It even took COA that came with the upgrade disc.
I did not try activating because it probably will fail if it uses SLIC to activate, or in worst case, it will get activated on my VM, and I will be unable to active it when I actually want to upgrade my notebook's OS.

But, the fact fully functional windows 7 was installed with the this upgrade disc and product key suggests that it is in fact just a Windows 7 OEM disc.


When you get your Windows 7 upgrade disc, try doing full clean installation.

 

I can confirm this too, did the exact same thing with VMware.

I should be installing that copy of Windows 7 probably next week, and I'm going to try my retail Windwos 7 Professional disk and see if the key works. My hunch is that the key is, like how they gave out the Vista upgrades, an OEM non-SLP key, which is in essence a retail key distributed by OEMs.

 

It does a clean install, no problems.

 

Does the Dell logo show up in the System Information? I'm wanting to use my retail disk because I want 32-bit (Dell disk is 64-bit and they won't send me a 32-bit disk) and don't want the Dell logo.

 

There was no Dell logo. If you want to use retail disc, you might have to delete or edit "ei.cfg" file (located in sources folder) in the disc.

If you delete this file, you can install all versions of Windows 7 (you will have multiple choice). And of course will you need product key for the version you install to activate it.

You can also edit this file to the version you want to install.

[EditionID]
Professional
[Channel]
OEM
[VL]
0​

This is what it says on OEM Windows 7 Professional edition.

 

Hmm, interesting. My Professional disk says Professional and Retail, but my Enterprise disk says Enterprise and OEM...

My question is that the Dell disk says OEM and my disk says retail...does it matter? Or will I need to change ei.cfg to match?

 

Retail vs. OEM in ei.cfg doesn't matter at all.

 

Thanks for confirming that. From my Vista experience, an OEM non-SLP key is treated the same as a retail key, and I haven't gotten a chance to test it for Windows 7 because I didn't want to waste the key to activate my VM (that's what Enterprise is for ).

 

I have tried to do this with my Dell Windows 7 Upgrade disc, the installation works fine but I cannot get it to activate with any method, even calling the automated microsoft activation failed.

 

I installed Windows 7 on my dell inspiron 1420. everything is working fine but the speaker is not working. No sound. Anyone know how to fix this?

 

You'll need to get the audio driver from Dell.

Welcome to Dell Support

Also check in the Device Manager, you're probably missing a couple other drivers as well.

 

Can you edit files on a DVD media? I didn't know that...