Doing a Full Install with Windows 7 Upgrade Media
As some of you may know, I'm currently rebuilding my dad's late 2008 15" MBP. He had a really weird problem that prevented him from surfing to ANY website with ANY browser. I know...I had him install 3 of the 4 major browsers on his PC and try them all. Nothing worked.
So, he shipped it to me with the idea that I would be blowing the Boot Camp partition and replacing XP with Windows 7 Professional 64bit.
After I backed up all of his stuff and had Windows 7 Professional installed, I went to activate it. It wouldn't activate. Nothing that I did would work. I kept getting an annoying error message from Activation that said something to the effect that you couldn't use upgrade media to do a clean install. If that was the case, why in the world was the option available to me?! It really ticked me off.
Thankfully, I have a few resources available to me, having been in the industry for 15 years. I gave my good friend, Paul Thurrott a phone call. I thought I saw, but couldn't remember an article that he wrote about this particular subject. Paul was right there, and Johnny on the spot with the solution. If you're bumping into problems with your install, you really need to give Paul's article a read. Its got a lot of great information in it.
What a great guy he is. He took the time to walk me through his article and to help me get the right solution for me.
So, thanks, Paul. My dad and I really appreciate your help.
