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I've got a laptop that came with Win 7 Home Premium pre-installed and I need to upgrade it to Win 7 Pro; I already have a licenced copy of Win 7 Pro for this.

Is it possible to generate a Windows Anytime Upgrade key using my Win 7 licence, or do I have to do a complete reinstall of Windows to accomplish this?

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Are you saying you have a Pro license key but no disk with which you can do the upgrade? This is why you are trying to generate teh any time upgrade? – Robert Kaucher Dec 10 '10 at 19:05
No, I've got the disk but it tells me I need an Anytime Update key to go from Win 7 Home to Win 7 Pro. You can buy these, but since I already have a licence I was looking for a way to use that without having to do a complete reinstall of OS, apps etc.. – Nick Crowther Dec 10 '10 at 21:59
What type of disk/license do you have? You can use an upgrade license with Anytime Upgrade even if you bought it with physical media. You can't use an OEM, VLK, or MSDN/TechNet license with anytime upgrade. – nhinkle♦ Dec 11 '10 at 23:24
@nhinkle - it's an MSDN licence, so I guess I'm doing a clean install after all, thanks. – Nick Crowther Dec 12 '10 at 9:42
Added answer based on your information. There is a way around it if you have access to a regular upgrade key, which lets you activate with the MSDN key later in the process. – nhinkle♦ Dec 12 '10 at 22:00
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migrated from serverfault.com Dec 11 '10 at 19:58

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1 Answer

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Since you have an MSDN license, you are technically required to do a clean install if you want to use your MSDN key.

If you own any valid upgrade key (even if you've already activated another installation with it), there is a trick to make anytime upgrade work. Run anytime upgrade using the regular upgrade key, and uncheck the box when it asks if you want to activate windows automatically. Then, once the upgrade is finished, go to the System control panel and click on "change product key". Enter your MSDN product key and activate with that. I've done this before (with MSDNAA, but it should work the same) and it went off without a hitch.

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+1 great answer – Moab Dec 12 '10 at 23:02
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