April 7, 2009 (Computerworld) (original article)

Microsoft Corp. today asked people running the Windows 7 beta to return their machines to Vista before upgrading again to the impending release candidate of Windows 7.

The company will, in fact, block upgrades from the beta to the release candidate, and plans to require users who balk at the request to edit an installation file to successfully update Windows 7.

Microsoft urged users who have downloaded and installed the beta of Windows 7 — the offered to the general public — to restore their PCs to Vista.

"We want to encourage you to revert to a Vista image and upgrade or to do a clean install, rather than upgrade the existing beta," Microsoft said in the blog. " As an extended member of the development team and a participant in the beta program that has helped us so much, we want to ask that you experience real-world setup and provide us real-world telemetry."

The problem with upgrading from one pre-release build to another, Microsoft said, is that the bugs or other problems users report in those scenarios are essentially worthless. "We don’t always track them down and fix them because they take time away from bugs that would only manifest themselves during this one-time pre-release operation," the company admitted.

The Windows 7 Release Candidate is the next major milestone for the operating system, and is expected to hit the street sometime next month.

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