Upgrading windows 7 home premium 64 bit to windows 7 professional 64 bit

Question

Can I upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64 bit to Windows 7 Professional 64 bit without losing my program information, my settings or my desktop? If yes, how to proceed?
Thank you for your answer! Manuel

Answer 1

Apologies about the delay. I've been brooding.
Although we don't know where the specific relevant keys are on modern versions of iTunes, there's a shotgun approach we can take to dealing with them, which has a reasonable chance of success in this case. The complicating factor in your case is that you've got a 64-bit Windows. So there's an extra hoop to jump through.
The basic approach is the procedure from the following weblog entry:
[Solving setup errors by using the SubInACL tool to repair file and registry permissions|http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/09/04/solving-setup-err ors-by-using-the-subinacl-tool-to-repair-file-and-registry-permissions.aspx]
The complicating factor is that we have to make an additional edit to the reset.cmd file.
When you're in Notepad, replacing the two YOURUSERNAME values with the name of your Windows 7 user account, in the first line of the batch file, replace the:
%programfiles%
... with:
%ProgramFiles(x86)%
(On a 64-bit Windows system, subinacl is installed in a different location than on 32-bit systems. So unless we make that change, the reset.cmd isn't going to be able to find subinacl and the reset.cmd won't work.)
While you're in Notepad editing the file, make sure each of the nine lines of the file start of a new line. (Sometimes they get smooshed up together on a single line, and then again the reset.cmd won't work.)
I'd strongly suggest setting up a System Restore point immediately prior to running the reset.cmd. There's instructions on that in the following document:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial143.html#manual