Review by Roger J. Buffington

Most laptops/notebooks seem to ship with Windows 7 Home Premium rather than Windows 7 Professional. That is probably fine for most users. However, if you need your Windows 7 Notebook to be part of a business domain network, you need Windows 7 Professional. This upgrade is how you accomplish the change.

It turns out that Windows 7 Home Premium already contains Windows 7 Professional; it is simply not enabled. When you buy this upgrade you are getting an upgrade key. No disk, just a key sticker and very brief instructions. Key it in pursuant to the laughably simple instructions and within minutes you will be running Windows 7 Professional. One caveat: apparently you cannot upgrade from Windows 7 32 to Windows 7 64 bit. This will affect very few users as I do not believe that hardly any computers are shipping with 32 bit Windows 7. Nor should they. Windows 7 64 bit is very compatible with existing 32 bit software, and in the future we can expect lots of 64 bit software and we all want to be ready for it.

Some have criticized Microsoft for charging for the upgrade from Home Premium to Professional, but my opinion (which is only that) is that Microsoft makes its living by selling operating system software and this is one way for them to do it. At least the upgrade is easy, painless, and quick. RJB.