Remember back in the Windows XP days? If you purchased the Upgrade version and wanted to do a clean install on a virgin hard drive, XP would ask you to put in the disk containing a previous version of Windows. How easy was that.

Vista was a lot more difficult to get around. You had to to a double install of Vista.

With Windows 7, it has all changed again. Luckily it can be very simple workaround – a simple registry tweak.

1. Disconnect from the internet, this just stops any automatic activation or updates coming through once Windows has installed, and although it does not matter, it’s just a extra step you got to wait until they are finished before doing the workaround.

2. Install Windows 7, when it asks you to input the product key, skip it.

3. Once Windows 7 has finished installing open regedit.exe.

4. Navigate to the following: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/

5. Find MediaBootInstall, double click it and change the value from “1” to “0“. If for some strange reason it is already at 0 all is good, skip to step 7.

6. Enter cmd in Start Menu search to load Command Prompt. Enter slmgr /rearm 

7. After the “Command completed successfully” dialog restart your computer. Once back in Windows, right click on Computer, Properties and under Windows Activation enter your Product Key and Activate.