Hi, I recently received an e-mail indicating that my RC will expire soon. I have 250 GB of hard disk almost full with my important data. I can only afford to format the windows partition ( Default: C:/ ). If I buy a genuine Windows 7 Ultimate, Can I upgrade my RC to the released version without any loss of data and applications?

No (you could with some trick but that won't get you a stable system). You must do a backup of your data before, and re-install your applications."I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. (Thomas J. Watson, Sr.)

I recently upgraded my Win7 RC to Win7 Premium using the Windows Easy Transfer option. It worked really well and saved all my data and settings for most applications. If you save any data in non-standard locations, you could lose it if you don't manually select it, but if you stick to "Documents" and "Public Fodlers" it will take care of it automatically.You will need another storage device, but really shouldn't you have something to back up you importan data anywars? You can get a second internal hard drive for $50-60 and do a clean install on it or you can get an external drive for $80-100. It is worth the investment as all drives will die.

Windows 7 checks whether or not the current version you are running is a pre-release copy, and prevents you from upgrading further. If you try, you'll get: You can't upgrade this pre-release version of Windows 7. Go on-line to see how to keep your files and settings. See here for a method that works well: Upgrade the Windows 7 RC to any retail version It also handles downgrading from Windows 7 Ultimate RC1 to any version of Windows 7: Home Premium, Pro or Ultimate. I used this method to go from Win 7 Ultimate RC1 to Win 7 Home Premium (both 32bit) with absolutely no problems and it's been working greate for 3-4 weeks now. It's not a supported or recommended path but it does work. YMMV of course.