Win 7 RC Expires March 1

I was just barely able to beat the deadline. I had reinstalled Windows 7 last night. If you had Windows 7 Beta or RC just like me your install will expire today and you'll have reduced functionality. Well technically it isn't 'expired' since you'll be able to use it until June, but it will shut down every two hours and it won't save any applications or data when it does. It's going to be a supreme bother that it won't be worth staying with it anyway.

It's best that you reinstall with the retail or OEM version. You can also try this great guide for upgrading to the final retail version on HowToGeek. You may notice the article says RTM instead of final version. Don't worry about that, RTM just means Released to Manufacturing, which in the PC industry means it's the final version that is released to big PC manufacturers just in time for the launch. It is almost similar to the retail version except for the customizations that manufacturers like Lenovo, Dell or HP include into their versions of the installer.

Back to the article on HowToGeek, it details how you can 'upgrade' your existing RC installation into the final version and at the same time preserving your settings and installed software. Note that since all RC and Beta versions were Ultimate, your retail or OEM version should be Windows 7 Ultimate for this to work. Bear in mind though that as with all work-arounds there are some instances it will not work. But that shouldn't discourage you from trying. You're going to do a full OSRI anyway, so why not try it and you may have shot at preserving all the stuff you already have in there.

As for me, I always do a full OSRI. I have my important data always saved or backed up in a separate partition. That way, any time I need to I can just reinstall Windows.