Ihave bought a newHP laptop bundled with windows 7 home premium. I also bought the upgrade for the windows 7 Professional. As per instructions, i backed up the laptop then run the Windows Anytime Upgrade service, entered the upgrade key and sat back in excitement. Two and a half hours later the laptop is still on the "Preparing to configure Windows- Do not turn off your computer." screen. Is this an expected and acceptable timeframe for a brand new machine to run this upgrade? I have to admit i ws not expecting this to take as long..i did read somewhere that an upgrade from Vista to 7 could take 1-2 hours. Thanks in advance!

HiActually the Anytime Upgrade sould on take around 10 to 15 Minutes?The anytime upgrade does notinstall anything, it simply unlocks features that are already on the system. You may have a third party software program that may be interferring with the upgrade.I would recommend performing a clean boot and then tring the upgrade again. Here is a link to the instructions.How to troubleshoot a problem by performing a clean boot in Windows 7Let us know if this works for you.Thank You for using Windows 7 Ronnie Vernon MVP

I have upgraded my early Vista, useless laptop to Win 7 Home (bought the Family pack to save $$$ on the 4 macines we have) and want to upgrade to Pro for the XP element of Win 7 (as I have already tried to load MSStreets and Trips with no success) Went to anytime upgrade to spend another 89.00 (that I shouldn't have to) and it says I must activate B4 I can buy. Go to activate system and it tells me that it is already activated. So................do you know if there's a way I can make this POS work so I can spend even more money with The Big MS since my profession and available software in my industry prohibits me from going MAC.

Hi Erimir, Although the current operating system is Windows 7, I still suggest you run Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor to determine which features and editions of Windows 7 will run on your PC. After that, you may disable the antivirus program to make sure the network connection is good and run Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade in Clean Boot as Ronnie Vernon suggested. For more information about Windows Anytime Upgrade, you may check the following link. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/windows-anytime-upgrade Hi Win7skeptic, In order to avoid confusion and keep track of the troubleshooting steps, you had better submit a new thread for a different question. Good luck! Arthur Li - MSFT