Upgrading from Home Premium (expired) to Professional

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The computer has Home Premium installed but not activated and 30-day limit has expired (black desktop background). I want to upgrade to Professional and register it.

Will I be able to do this without starting over with a fresh install?

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I would think you could enter the key using the Anytime Upgradeoption and activate it immediately.

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I have a couple more questions on this theme…
(Incidentally I am not the student–but I am doing this for the student.)
When purchasing the Student Windows 7 Professional OS from the MS website do you have to download it? I take it from Ted Myers reply above that I don’t even need the Professional disc–Just enter the Professional activation code to the Home Premium already installed and it will automatically upgrade Premium to Professional. Am I understanding that correctly?

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Would it be legal to copy a friends Professional discs instead of downloading them, buy the student activation code from MS, install Professional, and activate it? I have had some discussion about this, with some saying it is illegal to copy the discs but wouldn’t I be ending up with the same thing as if I had downloaded them? If you can download the files for free why would it be illegal to obtain the same files from a disc? Just wondering.

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I have a couple more questions on this theme…
(Incidentally I am not the student–but I am doing this for the student.)
Would it be legal to copy a friends Professional discs instead of downloading them, buy the student activation code from MS, install Professional, and activate it? I have had some discussion about this, with some saying it is illegal to copy the discs but wouldn’t I be ending up with the same thing as if I had downloaded them? If you can download the files for free why would it be illegal to obtain the same files from a disc? Just wondering.

As long as you have a legally purchased key, there are no problems doing that.

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It is not illegal to copy a disc, but you will only be able to activate it with a legally purchased key. Most retail versions of Win 7 include all versions and the OS and the key you have will unlock the correct version. You might want to consider downloading theWin 7 iso file that includes SP1, then burn it to a disk rather than copy your firends disk. You can use your purchased key and use this version to install rather than your friends disk. It could save you time as this iso file includes SP1.

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