Mohammed Ali from Qatar writes:
I have a Lenevo laptop with a Core-i5, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD and Windows 7 Home Basic. I want to change my theme, but it’s giving a message ” this edition of Windows doesn’t support themes.”
What’s the deal?
Windows 7 Basic, or starter edition, has some limitations that are not present in other versions of Windows. The differences are covered in a fantastic Wikipedia article available here.
Don’t worry though! The good news is Microsoft included an “Anytime Upgrade” option in Windows to allow you to upgrade your version of if you want/need these more advanced functions. If you go to the Start button and type in the search box “Anytime Upgrade” (without the quotation marks) you will get the Windows Anytime Upgrade tool.
This tool allows you to purchase, at a discounted price, the upgrade to a higher version of Windows 7. You can also enter a serial number from an upgrade disc purchased online or at a retail store to upgrade, too. Windows 7 Pro and Ultimate are common upgrades for people needing to connect to corporate networks (called domains), while Windows Home Premium is the popular upgrade for users of Windows Starter or Basic to gain all the functionality of Windows, minus enterprise and encryption services.
Hope this helps!
~Tim
Tags: anytime upgrade, windows 7, windows basic, windows starter, windows upgrade
May I offer a correction??? I just purchased a HP All-In-One computer in Panama that had Windows 7 Starter that was in Spanish. Not being able to read Spanish, I took advantage of anytime upgrade feature that was included in the programs menu and tried to upgrade, but was disappointed to discover that the Starter Edition did NOT support the upgrade feature into Windows 7 Ultimate that had the language change option…. I had to acquire Windows 7 Enterprise in English and reformat my computer….