The Windows 7 Upgrade Saga

hello everybody and welcome back to another video now in today's episode we're going to be doing something that we haven't done on this channel in a long time and that is a good old-fashioned Windows upgrade Saga the point of these videos is to try and upgrade through Windows beta builds to the final release of whatever that Windows version is and so far we've done this with Windows XP and Windows Vista but today we're going to be doing it with windows 7. so we already have the final build of Windows 7 installed on this HP laptop here but we're going to be formatting this pretty shortly here to install the earliest known build of Windows 7 that we have available to us and that is 64.69 that was compiled on October 2nd 2007 and then we're going to upgrade from that through a few other builds not all of them the point of this video is not to go through every single build because I mean that's something that we could theoretically do but it would just take a really really long time longer than this video is already he going to be so what I like to do is just select a handful of builds usually one from each point in the development cycle so today we've got a milestone one build which is 64.69 we've got a milestone 2 build we've got a milestone three build two beta builds One release candidate build and then the final release of Windows 7 and hopefully we'll be able to go through all of those so we're going to get started by popping in build 6469 and let's get this show on the road so we're just going to restart our lovely totally genuine copy of Windows 7 here you can see the data set to 1980 so yeah we got a boot into the BIOS and change that uh briefly here although we don't even really have to because as long as it's before the time bomb date which in this case is April 7th of 08 uh we'll be able to install it just fine but what's odd is I've been going through this setup utility here and I don't actually see a way to change the system date um because we've got I mean this is all system info restore defaults these are your exiting options you want to ignore or save changes security this is all like you know stuff for setting a drive password system IDs disk sanitizer these are Diagnostics and system configuration you've got boot options which doesn't apply to us nothing in device configuration built-in device options yeah like I don't actually think there's a way of changing the system date from the BIOS that is very I I never noticed that on this system yeah I don't see anything that allows us to change the date so we're just gonna have to uh just get out of here and go through the installer and it should actually let me do F9 just to make sure that we boot from the uh from the optical drive here hey there we go Windows is loading files so yeah as I said earlier this is the earliest build of Windows 7 that we have available to us but it's not the earliest known build that would be 64.29 from May of 2007. so about five months before this build was compiled and you're going to notice that a lot of Vista stuff remains in this early build here and that's just extremely common for these really early development cycle builds uh in fact you can see here that the final name wasn't even decided on yet because it says Windows code name Windows 7 which was actually the code name for Windows 7. remember blackcomb was a completely different thing that was a part of that road map that Microsoft created before Windows XP even released that they ultimately did not stick with but yeah so let's just go ahead and click on next here and we'll install now and we are going to just format the drive do a clean install and we should be able just to not enter a product key yes I'm not going to bother doing that now and we've got the pre-release software license agreement for Windows Vista Service Pack one again not uh anything really has been changed in here now it does say upgrade is disabled but I believe that's just because we are running a newer version of Windows so it doesn't let us upgrade from it but if we did have Vista installed I think you could upgrade to this build from Vista but of course we're just going to do a clean install here we could have theoretically done that but you know whatever I mean I already had Windows 7 installed and I guess while this is copying or well it's expanding files now but while it's doing that I can take you through the list of builds that I have selected for this upgrade procedure so we're going to go from 64.69 hopefully to 6608 which is is a milestone to the official Milestone 2 build actually and then we're going to go from that to 6801 which from what I've researched we might experience some problems upgrading to that that is probably going to be the problem build hopefully the only problem build because there have been some noted issues sometimes with um getting upgrading to work from previous builds but we're going to try it anyway and see what happens that's a milestone three build then we're going to go from that to a beta build 6931 and then we're going to go to the official beta build of 7000 and then we're going to go from that to the official release candidate build which is 7100 and then the final release 7600. so yeah it should make for an eventful upgrade procedure and hopefully you know everything will go smoothly but I'm expecting us to run into at least a couple issues probably with that that problem build that I mentioned where we might have some upgrade problems but um yeah it's going to be cool just to go through some of these beta builds again because it has been a while in fact the last time that I think I took a look at any of these was when I was making my Windows 7 development history video which I did back in the summer of 2020 I believe so yeah like three years ago gosh I can't even believe it's been that long since 2020. so if you missed that video and you want a more uh streamlined and concise version of basically what we're doing here go and check it out it'll be up in the cards that's just like a brief 10 to 15 minute video that takes you through Windows 7's development through taking a look at some of these builds and after probably 30 minutes or so of waiting it has finished so we are restarting now yeah I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of waiting around throughout this video as I have to wait through you know install processes and all of that you all don't have to deal with that thanks to the magic of editing but um yeah that's the one thing that's coming back to me that I'm like yeah I remember why I don't do these videos as often as I used to although I didn't really I mean I've done what like uh three or four of these so far because I did the original Windows upgrade special back when I hit 5 000 subscribers and that was just upgrading from Windows 1.0 you know the the classic video that like everybody does upgrading from Windows 1.0 to Windows uh 10. although I actually didn't get to Windows 10 I think I got the windows 7. then I did that same thing on the 98 PC um which I also only got to Windows 7 so I did uh that was in early 2020 and then I did the two or actually no I did the Windows Vista upgrade Saga the Windows XP upgrade Saga and then I did the Windows NT upgrade Saga which I upgraded through all of the Windows NT versions the final release is not the betas but yeah all this is kind of coming back to me now all the waiting uh like I'm already uh 45 minutes into this recording and uh we're not we don't we don't even have the first build installed yet but hey that just makes an authentic experience right just going through and uh installing these builds because if you were beta testing these I mean this is period specific Hardware this is a Windows Vista machine it's got a Core 2 Duo and uh four gigs of RAM upgraded from the original two gigabytes that was in here I believe although most of these builds you are not supposed to be beta testing because they were not supposed to be released outside of Microsoft but somebody leaked them anyway and well that's how we have them the only ones that were really officially released were the official like the official beta build the official rc1 build all right we have restarted once again and we should be done with the copying files and everything and as we go through these builds I am going to point out some of the noteworthy changes between them and despite this being such an early build there are some very notable improvements in fact they are kind of hidden things that are not enabled by default there is an early version of the Windows 7 super are in here that larger taskbar and there's a few other things but first let's get through our user account creation process so let's give this a name of let's just do Michael I guess why not we're not going to bother setting a password and we'll set uh let's see let's do the the chess icon here and we'll call this the seven upgrade Saga and all this should remain the same and not change as we go through these builds and I think we're going to change things up and not select the default just the wallpaper let's go with this one here I always like this one and we're going to ask me later for updates uh okay so now we can change the date so I'm just going to jump to 07 we'll jump to October and we'll do October 3rd which is the day after this build was compiled but yeah one thing you'll notice is we don't have proper display drivers installed because we've got these black bars on the side of the screen I'll see if I can jump into control panel and change the aspect ratio once we're done with this portion of the setup and though yeah one thing that I did not uh know while this was installing is what SKU this was going to be this is Windows Vista business first let me uh well we've got a few things happening we got the Welcome Center here we're going to get out of that Windows Defender failed to initialize okay not like that really matters because we're not going to use that and let's jump to personalize here let's go display settings and see what we can do um so oh yeah we've got 800 by 600 or we want 1024 by 768 so yeah even listing all modes here we don't get anything other than 640 by 480 or 10 24x768 so we would need to install the proper display driver to change the resolution to what it's supposed to be what this panel can handle uh you know what its maximum resolution is and I'm not too concerned about that and plus with these being beta builds we could run into issues getting the driver to work properly but let's go ahead and jump into some of the noteworthy changes in this build first off if we open up winver here the NT version is now 6.1 Windows Vistas was 6.0 and this was the final NT version that was chosen for Windows 7. I believe there was talk about making it 7.0 but they ultimately decided to just increment it by one minor version and go with 6.1 but yeah build 6469 there's the whole build string there this is a wex build which in fact whenever you try to run an application like regedit where you need admin privileges it will say wex build account in place of Microsoft corporation which is rather interesting but yeah speaking of registry editor we do need to open it up because one of the first sort of hidden features that we're going to explore is the early version of the super bar and that can be enabled by going into hkey current user we have to go into software Microsoft win do's current version and Explorer and inside of this key we have to create a new key and we're going to call that task band and we want to create a new d word value named can has super bar so you got some lovely Microsoft humor going on here and you set this value to one and now if we were I believe we can just restart Explorer so let's open up uh task manager here and just go to explore and end that and restart it and check that out we've got a super big chunky task bar down here I don't believe the uh smaller icons is uh functional at this point yeah I don't think we have that ability at this time and I don't think we can pin stuff to the taskbar either like when you right click we don't have that option to pin taskbar we can still pin stuff to the quick launch area over here but uh not to the actual taskbar itself like you can in Windows 7. so but yeah you know so you got an early version of that going on here which is kind of neat to see also Arrow preview you can see is kind of broken too where you can normally preview the window because this was a feature in Windows Vista a lot of people think it was introduced in Windows 7. it was actually in Vista but it was just a simple like you would Mouse over and you get a little preview and that was about it but yeah that is an early iteration of the super bar and let's hop back into reg edits because there's also an early version of libraries which was a feature introduced in Windows 7. so to enable this we just have to go up a key here to explore and we have to add a new d word value and call it use win7 nav Pane and change that to one and then we have to open up explore or not explore task manager and kill Explorer and then we run explore again although it's not doing what it's supposed to do it's supposed to show a show libraries button here and let me just double check this HP current user software Microsoft oh there okay so I just put it in the wrong key so we have to delete this and it has to go in the advanced key new d word value use win 7 nav pane one and let's uh restart explore again okay so now if we hop into let me turn off uh always on top here so yeah there we go now we have the show libraries button so when you click this and then we need to drag this up here and this gives us our libraries so we can go into documents here and of course this is all just experimental so they're not going to function like they do in Windows 7 but um yeah so they they were beginning to implement uh the libraries at this point in time which is cool to see so that's that and there's also a hidden sort of boot screen as well if we open up Ms config and if we go to boot here and select no GUI boots and we restart I'll just show you what this looks like and here it is it's just a static image but it's not anything that was actually included in the final build of Windows 7. now I should mention these features I just showed you are not the only changes in this build but they're some of the more noteworthy ones and that's pretty much what we're going to do as we go through these I'll touch on some of the major stuff and before we upgrade to the next build I am going to do the classic thing that is like a requirement for oh it's going to yell us about activation let's see just hit uh cancel for now oh no okay so I entered in a Vista retail key because you can use those with with this build here and uh it's not able to activate because it can't connect the internet we're just going to say ask me later and this should no oh come on all right I think what we have to do here is uh open up Windows Explorer and we got to open up command prompt and type in let's see here slmg R Dash re-arm and shut down Dash rst0 This should reset the activation timer for us haha just kidding no it doesn't uh so um yeah I I thought there was a way to like oh that's why it didn't work I need to have elevated privileges okay see I just didn't even see this message last time so I need to uh run into Windows is CMD in here it's in system 32 isn't it okay system 32 CMD run as administrator and Now slmgr re-arm command completed successfully please restart the system hooray there we go there we go okay so now before we uh before we jump into upgrading to the next build of Windows 7 here we're going to do the classic thing that is like a requirement um with these videos and that is changing the theme to some really obnoxious thing and hoping that the settings will carry over when we do the upgrade so we're going to go to appearance and personalization so I think we're going to leave the wallpaper the same and we'll go to uh change the color scheme and let's go to Vista basic we'll go to Advanced and let's change uh active title bar maybe let's up that yeah let's do like a hundred and we'll apply that and that'll just make it look beautiful yeah okay maybe we I like want to make this obnoxious but like not as obnoxious as I did in the longhorn video there we go doesn't that look just glorious guys um so with all of that set now of course we can change this when we get into the next build if we want to but let's see if these uh if these settings carry over so I'm going to pop in 6608 here oh yeah that's right it doesn't actually recognize the disk drive or boot into Windows here because we don't have the driver installed oh wait a second it is it's installing a driver here oh look at that DVD Ram device installed okay so it just took a restart and uh and yeah it just installed that driver for us awesome I wonder if it did that for the display driver too uh but yeah look what look at the Welcome Center by the way uh just the huge elephant in the room here I mean guy look at look at how glorious it looks with Comic Sans oh my gosh uh but yeah we're just gonna get out of that for now um I'm I'm curious let me jump in and see if we can change the uh resolution not that display settings no we still can't adjust that but I mean just for the heck of it you know I know I already said that we're not going to bother doing this but why don't we try to install the display driver um but just to clarify let's go to the computer yep there it is so we can start the setup from here let's do Windows Vista I'm just downloading the driver here from HP USB devices should work just fine right so let's pop in a USB flash drive here and there we go so we gotta run this setup executable this operating system is not supported all right at least we tried so uh yeah that's kind of what I thought was going to happen well hang on a second I just tried to install the Windows 7 inversion of the driver considering that that is the NT version number that we have now and that seems to be working nope never mind unknown error has occurred so yeah like I thought we're just gonna run into issues there so whatever not that I'm really concerned about that I'm more concerned about the fact that it recognized the DVD drive now so that's great we're going to run the setup executable from here alright so Windows 7 business yeah I just noticed that by the way Windows 7 business doesn't actually exist because it was called the Windows 7 Professional but at this time they're just going with all the Vista names so yeah Windows 7 business checking compatibility this should result in no errors though I don't want to jinx myself oh never mind you cannot upgrade from a non-staged build to a staged build that is definitely noteworthy all right we're back and it has been a little while since the last clip but I've got good news because I figured out why this isn't working and well that that's because as it says right here on screen we can't upgrade from a non-stage build to a stage build so that's pretty obvious well what does that mean well this is a non-staged build which is also known as a checked build which is kind of like a debug build of Windows and you you're not able to upgrade from checked builds to non-checked builds which are also known as staged builds now we could just try to find another checked build to upgrade to but the problem is the only other one in Windows 7's development lineage that we have available to us is build seven thousand that's the only other checked build that I was able to find obviously we're not going to upgrade right from this all the way to build 7000 because that completely skips like two or three stages in the development cycle so what we're gonna have to do is format this drive again and just install a completely different build now I thought about skipping Milestone one entirely and jumping directly to 6608 which is the Milestone 2 build we're trying to upgrade to right now but I said no why don't we just download a different Milestone one build and well it just so happens there is another one the official Milestone one build 65 19 that I've got burned to this DVD right here in fact it's the only other Milestone one build that we have available to us and this is a non-checked build or a staged build so we will be able to upgrade or should be able to anyways upgrade from this to 6608 I definitely expected some issues but like I said I thought they were going to begin with uh what is it build 6801 because that's the one where it is reported that there are issues getting the upgrade to work in certain circumstances I actually when I began prepping for this video I found somebody on beta archive who pretty much did this same thing they got a bunch of Windows 7 builds downloaded they tried to upgrade you know from actually I think starting with Windows Vista and then upgrading through a bunch of Windows 7 beta builds and they were able to do it but they specifically mentioned that build 6808 or 6801 they had issues and they did not even attempt as far as I know to try 64.69 and you try to upgrade from that to 65 19 or 6608 and well the reason is probably because it is a checked build now 6519 here was compiled on December 20th 2007 and again 6469 was compiled in October of 2007 so about two months have passed in between these builds now selecting the addition here so we can pretty much select any addition we want because all of these builds are multi-sku so we're just going to go with ultimate and just say yeah that's the one that we've purchased quote unquote and yeah you can see Microsoft pre-release Windows 7 operating system so by this point even though that you know the installer still identified itself as Vista had the Vista branding they have changed some of this stuff to say windows 7. and if you notice it doesn't say codename Windows 7 so they also had decided on the final Name by this point of course we're going to go with custom Advanced and we're going to just format this drive we're going to lose all of our wonderful customization settings uh it's such a shame but don't worry we're going to apply them again and this time it's going to be even better and there we go we'll hit next and now I gotta wait some more all right after about 20 or so minutes we are back so now we got to enter our name and all this lovely stuff again we're going to pretty much do the same thing as last time uh though what did I call the computer exactly I did like win7 upgrade Saga and we're gonna go with this wallpaper again and we're gonna ask me later and we'll just stay in Pacific time that's fine thank you and yeah as you can see we've got the Windows 7 branding down there instead of Windows Vista and look at that the the feedback icon on the desktop has been changed to the feedback button which is a little application here where you could send feedback to the developers and you might notice as well that the sidebar has been removed but the gadgets have not if you remember in Windows 7 you know Microsoft never removed gadgets but they removed the sidebar that Windows Vista had so here's the gadgets you know loaded up here and yeah there's there's no sidebar anymore so we're going to hop into rege edit here again and we're going to make some key modifications uh oh and I guess I can show you wind ver as well if I can actually hit the right key so whenever you can see that The Branding has been changed to the Windows 7 branding and yeah there you go so we're gonna hop into let's see here where do we have to go hkey current user software Microsoft Windows current version whoops Explorer and advanced and then we have to create a new d word value with the name enable CHS give it a value of one and now if we restart Explorer I think this will just do a couple of things so yeah the super bars back and you can see we now actually have pinned items to it so like I could right click here and click pin and we can close out of it and I think the way this works is there's still not a way to actually get running applications to be just the icon um so you see if I were to like open Task Manager it grows to have the text here but when I close out of it just goes back to the icon we also have libraries and just like in the last build we have to add a registry key to enable that so we're just going to add a d word value this time it is called M1 fno and we set that value to one yeah you can see here's the new libraries interface so we can go to documents we can back up here and so yeah they got new icons that were not used in Windows 7 but yeah those are a couple of things we do have the boot screen as well that I could show you I will just restart here and here it is so there is an animation on the bottom here you can see that little arrow like bar or line going across so this was ultimately obviously not used in Windows 7 but it is pretty cool honestly I mean looks more like Windows Vista to me than Windows 7. it would have been cool if they had included that in Vista because vista's boot screen is pretty boring as we all know and speaking of really boring I think this theme is pretty boring why don't we spice it up a little bit with some mjdness and just completely screw it over so we'll go into control panel here or actually what we could do check this out we can right click on the desktop and in addition to personalize we have a new display option which if you remember in the last build this display option was not here so this was added but we'll go back to control panel and we'll go to uh appearance and personalization you see we get some changes going on here on the sidebar as well we're going to change the color scheme we're going to set this to Windows classic and let's go to Advanced and let's just uh kind of go with that green to red gradients and there we go doesn't that just look glorious so we're going to pop in build 6608 once again oh and let's hope that it recognized the uh DVD drive which it did okay that's great uh you gotta love the build string down here man just I don't know what it is it was setting everything into Comic Sans just makes it look so goofy all right so just as a refresher I know I said all this before we'll just go through it again so 6608 this is the official Milestone 2 build so we're going to be upgrading from official Milestone one to official Milestone 2 which means that if this doesn't work Microsoft did not plan for people wanting to upgrade from Milestone one to Milestone two uh you know which would be really dumb but anyways we're going to uncheck this say we don't want to get the latest updates we're going to select Windows 7 ultimates hit next and there we go upgrade boom although remember that option showed up before and then it errored out so let me not jinx myself and make sure it actually says yes you can upgrade oh and there we go look at that so I got to do some more waiting gosh we're already like two hours into this and I don't even we're not even through the first upgrade yet all right so we've just finished the upgrade proceed feature and let's see after the really delayed startup sound plays uh let's see if it saved all of our wonderful visual settings aside from the visual Styles one of the things I am interested in seeing is if the super bar that we enabled in the last build remains because although it is in this build it's also a hidden feature but to enable it you have to add a bunch of d word values to the Windows registry instead of just the one that we did in the last build so that'll be interesting to see what happens oh look at that it saved our at least initially here it saved our theme it looks like task scheduler has stopped working okay we'll close out of that and will it save yep it's save the desktop wallpaper too honestly not that surprising but you know it's nice that I just I freaking love the Welcome Center I know we already saw this but oh my God it's it's nuts and yeah so it saved our wallpaper it saved all of our visual settings and yes it looks like the taskbar has reset uh to the non-super bar variety um so to enable that I'm going to go ahead and uh copy over it it's actually just easier to run a DOT reg file because there's literally there's a bunch of stuff you have to add so I'm just going to copy all this information on my laptop here alright so I've got those files on this flash drive here let's plug it in and I think what I'm going to do temporarily of course is uh switch this back to the you know normal theme um though I am going to save this one I'm definitely going to do that so we can just easily swamp back to it we'll save theme and oh we can't even see the freaking can't even see the file name text box there so we'll call this awesome theme dot theme and there we go okay so that's been saved so we'll swap back to just the windows regular theme here so there we go and now if we hop into here let me just copy uh both of these files so yeah I have two different reg files here because you can also enable Arrow Peak as well by adding some information to the registry um so let's go ahead and run the super bar and we'll say yes we want to add to the Windows registry it's been successfully added let's do Arrow Peak as well there we go and now you can see that unlike in the last build we can actually just have the like for running applications you can have just the icon down here instead of the icon and the text we still cannot get previews of the applications by mousing over if we do have this button here this little arrow where you can choose to pin it to the taskbar which will do that so now we close out of it and it's there and I think for Arrow Peak to work you have to have the arrow theme enabled because normally with arrow Peak you'll be able to Mouse over the show desktop button here and it will give you a little preview of what's on your desktop and just kind of move all the windows or fade them out of the way temporarily and then if you click on it of course it will just show the desktop but uh that doesn't happen and I'm pretty sure we're not going to be able I don't know why I just opened task manager again I'm pretty sure we're not going to be able to apply the arrow theme but we can try I mean we do have the hardware for it it's just that we don't have the driver installed because yeah Windows Arrow doesn't even show up in here so that's not surprising but yeah there it is we'll run uh windver here just to give you a look at what we got going on so of course 6.1 6608 and I think we're just gonna jump uh right into the Milestone 3 build so the Milestone 3 build that we have is 6801 which this is again the problem build that I have read has caused problems for some people trying to upgrade from earlier builds to it and before we do that let me jump in here and set my theme settings back to uh you know to the way they were before and I think there it is we'll apply that oh no it got rid of my color settings it didn't save any of that oh that's really annoying all right well we'll have to do all this again I don't want to change the desktop now that's interesting the effects button that we had here went away you notice that there used to be an effects button right here and yeah why did it apply the Windows standard we had Windows classic selected that's very interesting all right there we go I can oh my holy cow look it's like it hasn't completely applied yet we gotta Mouse over everything um but okay let's uh let's go into my computer here or just computer and go to oh look at that it hasn't it has not recognized the uh DVD drive unfortunately so we might have to restart let's just do that really quickly all right task schedule or crashed again I'm guessing that's a bug with this build and I don't see anything coming about new devices so oh there it is okay so we just had to restart all right so let's see we're gonna accept our license terms you can see little remnants of our custom theme taken over here in the installer let's see let's see will it work because if everyone else had issues then I'm definitely have issues it's only the stuff that works for everybody else that I have problems with that I have like unique problems with oh wait a second no way no freaking way we're not in the home stretch yet it just started I don't know if the error message comes up before this or if it comes up during this I'm betting it's going to come up it very well could still I'm just expecting it at this point I'm going to be floored if this actually goes through and works but we'll just let it do its thing and hopefully when I talk to you guys again we'll have this build installed but something tells me it's not going to happen well well well like I said we were going to run into issues and sure enough we did so here is that error message which says we cannot upgrade to this version of Windows because the disks were formatted in an incompatible Way by newer version of Windows uh so it was worth a try so I think what we're going to do here is just jump right to 69.31 this is a beta build of Windows 7 that was compiled on October 16 2008 so that is about a month after Milestone three so this bill that we try to install was pretty much late Milestone three uh and this is noteworthy too because if you remember from the beginning 6469 that was compiled in October of 2007. so it took about a year actually just over a year to get from Milestone one all the way to Beta but let's go ahead and pop this disc in and we will start these setup executable oh and it just unrecognized our disk drive for some reason that's interesting well apparently the disk drive locked up because it was not ejecting when I tried to eject it so I just went ahead and restarted and well here it is so let's run the setup executable here now I should mention in the beta phase of Windows 7's development there are a lot of builds that we know of in fact there's way more there are there are actually more beta builds than Milestone one Milestone 2 and Milestone 3 builds combined that we know of anyways and the beta development stage lasted from the earliest known build is 6910 from September of 2008 and ended with the official build 7000 from December of 2008 so that's like three months that's how long Windows 7 was in beta so let's go ahead and not agree to getting latest updates we're going to select like the Windows 7 ultimates you can see that the names of the operating system the way this is formatted has changed a little bit over time as well just again some minor stuff and we will accept the license agreements and we'll hit upgrade while at this point I'm just going to let it do its thing once again and I'll be back with you in probably a good 20 minutes or so well we just finished and as you can see we got a new boot screen and something else we've got a widescreen aspect ratio so yeah it was able it just automatically installed whatever driver it's got running now which uh yeah allows us to or just change this to to this resolution which is great so we're not going to bother entering a product key we're going to ask me later keep all this stuff the same so the big question will it keep our desktop theme and everything yes it has check that out so yeah it's uh it's kept our wallpaper and everything which I mean to be honest I did expect it to but it's nice to see that uh that it actually did so we have a feedback button and send feedback so I'm guessing that this was left over from the previous build and yeah you see we actually get an error message trying to run it and this is the new feedback application where Microsoft wants to uh hear about your experience and uh my guess is these guys did you see how they're like not to the edge of the screen I'm guessing it kept it in this position because you know this was the position it was when it was set to the previous resolution and so it probably just kept them there and we got to push them over here now I'm gonna try to save this theme again I don't know why it did not like we want to save it like this and we're gonna save theme as the awesome theme yeah so if I switch away and I switch back to it okay it keeps all the coloring that's what I want so yeah here is the default Windows theme and you can see we get Arrow glass now look at that isn't that wonderful for some reason the background kind of glitched out there uh okay you can see we got Arrow snapping here which is great Arrow Peak let's see if that works it should be when you hover over or no it still doesn't seem to work oh there we go okay that's odd you see that so I click on show desktop and it shows the desktop but when you have like one of these windows opened up it freaks out and just gets rid of the desktop so let me uh let me open up task manager and let's restart Explorer here all right there we go so yeah the Windows Vista taskbar you can see is just like we've lost the super bar I think we have to run that same registry script to enable it yeah there's not any option in here to change the taskbar you know type like to enable the super bar so I think you have to do that from the writer street again but you can see we've got the newer style Windows 7 start menu in here with the redesigned you know search thing down here and of course the lovely beta fish wallpaper probably one of my favorites uh Windows beta wallpapers because I think it's a really clever pun but let's try to run okay so we already know Arrow Peak does not seem to work so if we run this same registry script let's add that to the registry and we're gonna have have to kill Explorer again and maybe desktop Window Manager too so let's have that restart and then run Explorer again nope that still doesn't seem to work that's interesting let's try to run the super bar registry entries here successfully added the registry okay let's kill Explorer okay that's interesting you see it kind of looked like it tried to apply that's very interesting I like I don't see a way on how to enable this but apparently there is because there's just screenshots some of them have the super bar and some of them does not and the beta wiki page says that the super bars received a facelift making it very similar to RTM um but we can't enable it with this script of course that was for an older build so I didn't really think it was going to do anything but as we go around here you'll notice that pretty much every mention of Windows Vista is gone by this point the Explorer has been redesigned as well by this point there are some differences you see like in documents here like this bar up here doesn't look exactly as it was in the final release of Windows 7. the only photo we have in here is image 20 which I was using as the default desktop wallpaper and yeah let me um speaking of themes let's reapply my wonderful Awesome theme here which should yep save our coloring information and now we're going to upgrade to the final Beta release the official Beta release which was build 7000 compiled in December of 2008 which is like two months after this build came out now honestly from this point out this stuff's probably not going to be the most exciting because in terms of visual changes like major visual changes you're not going to see much of that as we go through build seven thousand seven hundred and seventy six hundred because everything I mean we're nearing the end of the development cycle by this point you see here it only gives us Windows 7 Ultimate x86 instead of the multiple options we had before and now it says Windows 7 Operating System beta and we're going to uh okay now this is interesting can we not upgrade to build 7000 see just when I said things weren't going to be interesting it actually gets kind of interesting so apparently you can't I guess upgrade is disabled I think it is because it should I mean I'm seeing like it gives us the disk drive selection screen I'm like wait a second it shouldn't it should give us the option to upgrade that is really interesting because beta Wiki has a screenshot of this build upgrading from a previous version of Windows now maybe it was a later beta build hey that rhymed because this again is uh for what build I've got so many build numbers I'm forgetting which one it is this is 69.31 6931 there are let's see here one two three there's three leaked builds that we have accessible to us that come right after that and right before build 7000 so it might be that we have to upgrade to one of those to then get to 7000 or we could just try to skip directly to rc1 which I think would definitely not work if it doesn't let us upgrade here to the beta the final Beta release but that's interesting it straight up doesn't even give us like normally it'll say upgrade is disabled and you have to go through custom install it's not even doing that it's jumping straight into custom install because again if we hit next here it just says that this partition you selected might contain files from a previous Windows installation if it does will move to windows.old which is like that partial upgrade sort of thing where it will keep your files but it is a clean install so it won't save any of our user preferences so yeah we're going to hop out of this and I'm going to try build 7100 just for the heck of it oh and check this out we've got the final setup Background by this point I think 7100 I think by this point the beta fish wallpaper is gone no it's still here at least according to this screenshot that I just pulled up so okay we're going to not get the latest updates except next there we go upgrade look at that it shows up isn't that amazing let's see if this ah no we can't you cannot upgrade to this pre-release version of Windows 7 go online to see how to install Windows 7 and keep your files in settings I'm thinking this is probably just because we're on this earlier beta build it might be expecting us to have like the you know build 7000 and so there may be later RTM or not RTM RC build before we could upgrade to the final release candidate build but I went and took a look at that beta archive posting and then I mentioned earlier of the person who tried to also do this and apparently they were able to go from let's see 6931 they went from 6931 to 69.41 to 69.59 then to 7000 and it looks like they didn't even go to 7100 they went through like a bunch of other RC builds before getting to RTM so I think what we're going to do is we're going to try I'm gonna have to download uh well I'm gonna download a few things but we're gonna basically work our way back so we're trying to upgrade to 7 000 right now or not right now but initially we're trying to upgrade to build 7000. I'm going to try if we get 7000 installed I think we could upgrade to 7100 hopefully that's my current theory but to get the 7000 we have to upgrade to at least one other build in between the build we're currently running 6931 and 7 000 and in between those two builds we've got 6936 6941 and 69.56 so I think what I'm going to do is download 6956 well I'm going to download a couple things actually because I'm going to get a few of these built just in case this one doesn't work we're going to start with 69.56 and basically go back one release try to upgrade from 6931 to that and then from that to 7000 and then from 7 000 to 7100 you see how like this just gets like spiraled out of control like just from one thing failing so I'm gonna go and do some prep work off camera and hopefully I'll have a solution when I come back to you guys all right welcome back so there's been some developments uh number one I took a look at these three builds that come before 7000 and after 6931 and I first looked at 69.56 which is the leaked build that comes immediately before seven thousand and apparently there's a bit of a bug when you try to upgrade to it and to get around that you have to copy a file from build 7 even thousands setup files over to the iso for 6956 which we could try but I have the feeling that since we already tried build 7000 and that upgrade didn't work didn't let us upgrade to it if we copy a file from it over to 69.56 it might result in the same thing so what I've done is I've copied over or rather burned an ISO for 6941 which it comes before 69.56 it's the build immediately before that and we're going to try to upgrade to this first and then if that doesn't work we'll try 69.36 are all these numbers confusing you yet yeah it's definitely a lot to keep track of so 6941 is a pre-beta build from uh and actually I guess I should clarify here because even though beta Wiki has all of these builds uh listed under beta build 7000 is the official beta and it looks like everything before that are technically pre-beta builds even though they're grouped under the beta category so this is a pre-beta build that was compiled on November 2nd 2008 and I've got that disc in the drive right now but before we get to that I do want to touch on one other thing and that is blue pill so we've got this appropriately blue USB drive here and we're going to plug that in to take a look at the blue pill locked features so blue pill for those who aren't aware is similar to red pill in Windows 8 builds this was basically a feature locking functionality that Microsoft had in these builds to kind of hide some of the the features they were working on uh in the event that these builds ever got leaked of course people have found a way to you know enable access to these features so we're going to go ahead and copy this executable here over the desktop so remember before when I was trying to get the super bar working and all that and nothing was happening well that's because those features are locked behind blue pill so we're going to run blue pill here and this should give us the ability we're going to install blue pill you can now log off and log back on so when we do that and we log back in we should now see the super bar so yeah there it is you can see of course it doesn't look super great with this old theme applied but you know these are the the pinned items here I'm just going to go ahead and change this back we'll go into personalize here and Swap this to the uh regular Windows 7 theme here and you can see that this looks uh really really close to you know what we what we had in Windows 7 so you've got these items pinned down here although you can see it is doing the thing where when you click on an item it it grows and adds the the text here to the end um I believe if we go to properties here you might be able to enable that let's see oh yeah always combine hide labels this should do it so that's that's exactly what I'm talking about and we should have Arrow Peak working as well which is when we yep there it is so you can hover over the show desktop button and you can get a peek all the windows will kind of Fade Away except for the outline and you can see behind the desktop so yeah blue pill an important thing to install if you want to take a look at every feature in these Windows 7 builds not all of them not all of them have blue pill locked features but these beta builds do or these pre-beta builds I should say so let's go ahead and open up file explorer here and we're going to go into um where's this PC at that's interesting it's not pinned on the sidebar here by default oh look at me I said this PC it wasn't called this PC yet it was called my computer or no it was called computer not even my computer yeah they all mean the same thing I know there's gonna be like one guy who's gonna go like actually it's called yeah okay we know dude but it's it's all the it's all the same program like chill okay um let's go ahead and just uh oh look at that it's not recognizing the disk try you know what's funny like I've got so many of these discs I seriously have already lost track I mean I've got like these DVDs here you can see I just dropped one on the desk uh I've already kind I think this one I mean this is the case for build 7000 but I didn't put the disc back in the case for some reason uh I think the one I had sitting on top of it was build 7000 and then one of these is uh 7100 so yeah uh this is going to be fun to kind of go through when we assuming we can actually get this ability to install here but yeah this is a lot to just keep track of for sure but these videos are fun you know it's fun to go through and just try I mean we we do run into issues as I mean as is Pretty expected honestly for I mean number one for this channel but also the fact that we're you know using beta software here um so anyway let's open up my computer and there's the disk drive it shows up now and let's open this up application not found that's lovely uh yeah it doesn't even it shows like there's no yeah it shows 4.37 gigs of free space what the heck is that about um can we open this up here okay that's interesting uh can we run setup I think we can and that's interesting did you notice that that wasn't signed by Microsoft it said the signature was unknown I don't think that when we tried to run the last setup executable for build 7000 7100 I think we were able to see the used space on the on the drive so maybe that's something with blue pill you know when we enabled that uh maybe it broke seeing the actual used space on disk drives but not hard drives because the hard drive was fine I don't know it could just be a one-off thing but whatever point is we were able to launch this setup so we're gonna do Windows 7 Ultimate and and and accept and upgrade there we go oh you know what I forgot to change the theme back to our glorious custom theme although it should still be there it should still show up in the personalization settings because it is a saved theme in fact there's two saved themes uh so we should be able to easily swap it back but that was my bad I was too focused on blue pill that I forgot to change the uh theme back but whatever it's copying files it's looking good so hopefully when I speak with you guys again we'll be running build 6941 which would be rather nice and look at that not only did the first portion of the setup complete successfully but we've got the Windows 7 boost screen like the final boot screen at least it certainly looks like that all right we made it and I made an interesting realization uh which basically amounts to uh well I kind of screwed up with the Windows 7 beta build 7000 build that we tried to install earlier because you know I had all these DVDs laid out here and so I was putting them into my capture PC over here to figure out which one was which and I noticed that this build 7000 disk this ISO image that I burned to it anyways um was actually Modified by a third party because there's like a file on this disk that's dated like 2020 or 2021 which obviously would not have been possible this builds from 2008 2009 whatever it was and the upgrade folder which if I were to go into like oh and look at this it for some reason applied the old uh Windows classic theme here that's interesting because we had the Windows 7 theme applied but anyways if we go into gosh computer is still not in the sidebar here that is annoying it shows up when you open up a computer so there it is first of all you see this string of text as the actual like name of the DVD right so take take note of that we're going to open this up and you see there's this upgrade folder right if I were to put in the build 7000 disk check this out the drive label is Windows Vienna uh which it's not supposed to be it's supposed to be a string like we just saw on the other uh drive or on the other disk and you see yeah there's this file 620 of 2022 all these folders were modified on 620 2022 and the upgrade folder is missing so this was modified by somebody and that's why when we tried to upgrade to it it didn't even give us the option to upgrade because the files weren't there so we might have been able to upgrade from the previous build we were running directly to build 7000 if I had the Right iso image some of these isos I got from internet archive and apparently the one that I downloaded from there for build 7000 was this ISO which is not an original one and has had as you've seen some of the files modified so um what we're going to do I am downloading a build 7000 ISO right now now also from internet archive but I looked inside the ISO file to view its contents because you can do that on the internet archive before downloading it and it has that upgrade folder so this is most likely an unmodified ISO image so I'm downloading that right now but downloading things from the internet archive is rather slow I mean I have half a gigabit down and this is a 2.5 gigabyte file and it's going to take like two hours to download for me um so yeah I basically have that running in the background right now but I'm going to see if we can just skip right to build 7100 the RTM or not the RTM the RC build the official release Canada build oh and also while we're waiting for that to load up I can change the theme back to our here it is there we go our theme is still there look at that lovely lovely lovely lovely okay so let's run setup.exe so yeah basically we just wasted a bunch of time with me trying to uh install like I probably didn't have to install this build I don't know maybe we still couldn't upgrade from oh gosh what were we running before build uh 69 31 yeah 69 31 maybe we could have upgraded from that to build 7000 if I had the ISO file with the upgrade files on it um but let's see if we can okay upgrade let's see what happens I believe this aired out yeah you can upgrade this pre-release version of Windows 7 and go online and see how to upgrade okay so we probably have to agree to build 7000 first and then hopefully to this so I'm going to wait uh the two hours for this freaking ISO file to download and um I'll come back with you guys once that's finished all right after much waiting I've got what hopefully is an actual genuine build 7000 ISO image burned to this DVD let's see if it has forgotten because I have uh restarted the computer okay good it still recognizes the DVD drive so that's great and if we go in here if I can right click on the menu come on you can do it come on context menu you can do it I believe in you oh my gosh no it's not responding all right fine we'll restart Windows Explorer this is windows's way of letting me know that uh it doesn't appreciate me setting the font for the titles and everything to Comic Sans um okay can we why is I explorer running what the heck okay so Explorer is so not responding that we can't even kill the process here uh oh my gosh why is look at this why is my mouse cursor going behind task manager what we're gonna open this up and you see that all of these files and folders were last modified in 2008 and we have the upgrade folder so theoretically speaking we should be able to run setup and there we go we get the option to upgrade so let's select that and hopefully we won't get that error message that 7100 kept giving us there we go I'm not going to say anything else though because I don't want to jinx myself but it's looking good well good news everyone we got it to install without any issues and okay I think it might have I think it might have gotten rid of our theme yeah because we we definitely had theme applied beforehand let's go into compute not computer control panel and take a look at our personalization settings so we have okay this is a custom one and this is the awesome theme okay so for some reason it set it back to this one I'm just going to delete this one because we don't need that one this is the one that we definitely want here but we'll set it back temporarily to the uh standard Windows theme yeah we got that same bug going on where it shows that this DVD even though it has data on it is it like has nothing it says it's 4.37 gigs of free space uh so yeah that's rather interesting obviously that did get fixed you know at at some point maybe in the next build we'll see and speaking of let's pop in the CD 470 100. now we're not going to install it quite yet because I do want to take you around this build just briefly because as you can see things are definitely coming together we have the super bar down here you know enabled by default it's not locked behind blue pill anymore and you can see we've got three shortcuts for Windows Media Player this is a bug that happens it has been reported uh numerous times as I've been reading about these builds that when you upgrade between them certain builds will cause an additional Windows Media Player icon to be added added to the taskbar and in this case we had two additional ones so there's three total now which is great but if we go into the sort menu you can see that it's also pretty much final um and you know yeah things are just looking really good if we go into Explorer um we still do not have computer on the side unless you open up computer then it shows up so I I'm expecting that's a bug that they haven't fixed yet because we've noticed this in the past couple builds uh so you know oh and look at that it just it just stopped recognizing the disk drive again this is really annoying it just like uninstalls it almost from the system I'm going to open up device manager no it's like the device just got uninstalled from the system and I'm guessing this is the the unknown device on PCI bus I mean I'm guessing this is it can we hit like update driver unable to find okay I'm gonna restart and it should show up under disk drives let's just confirm that when I restart here there it is and yeah now DVD slash CD-ROM drivers shows up and there it is but we still have unknown on PCI but okay so this is not the disk drive then it's obviously a bug of some kind um but we're gonna open this up and then we're gonna run the setup executable and yeah we're definitely in the home stretch because we've got this build and then I have the RTM build uh copied over this DVD right here so I'm I'm definitely optimistic I know we had trouble with 7100 before but I think that's just because we were trying to upgrade from a build was too old like we had to be running build 7000 is my guess and now we're running it so let's see if I'm right oh no oh no oh my gosh so we can't actually upgrade from the official beta to the official release candidate wow that is surprising I thought for sure we'd be able to do that see as soon as I said we're in the home stretch uh apparently we're not although can we go from beta to RTM and if that doesn't work we're gonna have to download one of these pre-release candidate builds and try to upgrade to one of those and then to the final build but I don't know I mean it says here you can't upgrade this pre-release version of Windows 7. like that's kind of word to imply that we can upgrade the pre-release version we're currently running which is not true because this same message showed up on the last build we were able to upgrade from that but is this saying that we can't upgrade to this pre-release like regardless of uh what build we have running it won't let us upgrade to it the beta Wiki page does not say anything about upgrading not working it just says it was released on April 30th 2009 the general public five days later beta archives page on this is like one sentence so uh yeah that's let's try the collection book official police candidate build it's not much different than previous builds leaked mostly it's our bug it mostly it are bug fixes there's a typo on this page um yeah nothing about uh nothing about upgrading being disabled so uh let's just try to uh upgrade to RTM and see if we can skip release candidate entirely that would be really nice wouldn't it uh uh you can upgrade this pre-release version of Windows 7. I thought I was like almost done with recording this video like yeah I'm gonna have to download like one of these pre-rc builds all right hang on a second because I made another discovery that actually makes this whole thing much easier at least theoretically if this actually works okay new development now it's not recognizing the disk drive at all even after restarting twice so now there's something else wrong but you know whatever because I've got a USB one that we're going to use and this will probably be quicker than trying to troubleshoot and you know install the driver only for it to fail and whatever so I'm just going to to do this there we go so if we open up this is a modified uh 7100 install disk image that I've got burned to this DVD right now and if we hop into sources and if we scroll down and look for C version dot ini if we open this up with a notepad here let me just change the font so that this will show up a little bit better on camera so there are two lines in here or actually three lines if you count the host build text and the brackets here and this Min client minimum client was set to 70 77.0 Min server was seven thousand point zero by default which means that you have to be running 7077 or later to do the upgrade so I went ahead and changed this to 7000.0 which theoretically will mean that when we run the installer it will allow us to do the upgrade and there we go look at that so that is what it was I'm not going to say anything else because I don't want to jinx myself let's see if it actually installs well well well look at this that's right it actually worked as the computer's about to go to sleep so yeah here we are running hang on let me pull up windver here build 7100 which is just awesome that means we have one build left to go and I've got the RTM release of Windows 7 burn to this DVD and I still have the USB DVD drive plugged in because it is still not recognizing the internal one so we're gonna pop it into that and yeah that's still very interesting how it's just arbitrarily uh not recognizing and then deciding to recognize the DVD drive also what's odd is if you look at the Windows Explorer here we've opened up computer and computer is not on the sidebar now previously we would open up like recycle bin or we would click down here to open up the libraries and it would not be there but now it's also not there when you actually open up computer which it was in like the last build so this is definitely odd and I don't think it's normally supposed to behave this way in 7100 because this is a really really like close to final implementation of windows 7. but I did have to modify this CD as well because we have the same thing going on with that c version dot ini file in the sources folder so we'll open this up here and I'll show you that again uh you can see that I have changed the minimum client version string to say 7100 now Min server was already 7100 which I find interesting how Microsoft evidently did not change this but they had changed this to 7233 which is noteworthy because 7233 is an unleaked build of Windows 7. now apparently 7233 was mentioned in a Microsoft blog post but it was also the minimum client string uh for the the build of Windows you had to be running to upgrade to RTM so I went ahead and changed that to 7100 so theoretically we should be able to do the exact same thing we just did and run setup oh yeah and if you noticed I forgot to set the theme back to our glorious custom theme once again so we're going to to see if that Still Remains and there we go copying files so I'm not going to jinx myself and we're just gonna let this do its thing oh my gosh look at that it actually worked you guys uh so yes it successfully completed the installation and now it's finalizing our settings let me tell you I have never been more excited to get Windows 7 installed in my life and would you look at that it kept the betta fish wallpaper so that's pretty cool uh just to you know confirm here we are of course running build 7600 the final release of Windows 7. and yeah so if we go into personalized let's see um yeah unsaved oh no it got rid of our themes no it got no gosh I should have applied the uh custom theme that we made dang it um well it technically did save a theme it just is the unsaved theme with the beta fish wallpaper so of course here's the default Windows 7 one but we're gonna keep it on this and let's go into file explorer and see if no computer is still not there that is really bizarre and it's not there in here either so I'm guessing that's some preference that I don't know was set in one of the earlier builds that it's retaining because it's normally supposed to show up here certainly when you're in computer but even when you're just in like recycle bin or another Windows Explorer when it was supposed to show up here on the side by default so that is interesting uh it's still not recognizing our internal DVD drive unfortunately but I mean yeah that that is it like even with all these quirks we still upgraded from uh the very first uh leaked build of Windows 7 or I guess definitely not that one one of the earliest builds of Windows 7 all the way to RTM with numerous problems but you know what we did it and that's what matters and uh I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did be sure to give it a thumbs up get subscribed all that good stuff and if you really enjoyed this video and if you want to get early access to future videos of mine I do have a patreon page down below that you can check out either way I just want to thank you all so much for watching teaching and as always I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Michael MJD

Views: 288,815

Keywords: video, michaelmjd, mjd7999, game, review, overview, apple, microsoft, unboxing, tutorial, windows, how-to, mac, os, system, michael mjd

Id: fP5o0h_8D5Q

Length: 69min 24sec (4164 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2023