Millions of people around the globe have downloaded and installed beta versions of Windows 7. And soon Microsoft will be launching a release candidate which offers new features and bug fixes. But the company's not making it easy to upgrade from Windows 7 beta to the Windows 7 release candidate.

And there's a good reason for that: When the company releases the full version of Windows 7 most people aren't going to be upgrading from a pre-release version. They'll be upgrading from Windows Vista or performing a fresh install. (Microsoft has already said there will not be an easy upgrade path from Windows XP). And the whole point of putting out betas and release candidates is to test software in real-world conditions.

In a blog post, Microsoft's Windows 7 team is encouraging beta testers who plan to upgrade to the release candidate to revert to Windows Vista before upgrading, or to do a fresh install of the new release candidate. The team acknowledges that this will be a real hassle for anyone that has started to use Windows 7 beta as their primary operating system. But that's what you get for treating beta software as if it were a finished product. It isn't.

In the blog post, Microsoft does offer instructions for upgrading from an existing Windows 7 build to a newer version. But it requires tweaking some system files and there's absolutely no guarantee that the process will go off without a hitch. In fact, it sounds likely that you will experience some problems if you go this route, and Microsoft has no plans to figure out how to fix these errors because this isn't the usage scenario the company expects real world users to follow.

[via CNet]