Hi and welcome to the forum:
Manufacturer utilities can vary from windows version to windows version as you say. In a perfect world, if you select a Win7 "feature" upgrade, any HP utilities that were installed at the factory with the HP Windows7 install, should work in
ALL versions of Windows7. However, in practicality, many downgraded OS products such as Win7 Starter and Win7 Home Basic may not support that particular HP utility. On the upgrade side, which would be Win7 Home to Win7 Ultimate; we can't be certain. Unless someone else here has done that particular upgrade and has a machine they can actually look at and test your "Graphics" utility, we can neve be certain whether it still works or note.
I would suggest that you ring up HP support and ask them this question; they have a huge knowledgebase with thousands of questions like this about upgrades; they can look it up for you in a few seconds. A few years back, HP support had online Chat which was a real easy way to do it without having to talk to someone in India. Alas, they have gotten rid of it as have most of the other laptop/notebook manufacturers, with the notable exception of Dell. If their knowledgebase says that utility should be safe from the Win7 Ultimate upgrade, then it probably will be. But, with uprades, as you are no doubt aware there are hundreds of sublte differences that each person makes depending on exactly what buttons they click during the upgrade, various selections, options, etc. that could make your utility not work. It's not going to be 100% even if HP tells you it will. However, there's a good chance it will be ok if you use the most common upgrade options
(use All Defaults). With all this discussion, another way to go would be to buy another hard drive for your laptop; install your Win7 Home from factory Recovery Discs and run the Win7 Ultimate upgrade. Test to see if your "Graphics Utility" is still there post-upgrade, and that it still works as expected. If it does, remove the
"TEST" hard drive from your laptop, and reinsert your original drive and do a 2nd upgrade which should work. New laptop drives are mostly under $100 on ebay or amazon, unless it's an SSD or SSHD. It would be a cheap way to find out if the Utility will work before you try the upgrade, which is why you posted the question here.
If however, using the
"TEST" hard drive for the Ultimate upgrade disables or removes the "Graphics Utilitiy" from Ultimate, then you know that there exists an incompatibility between Ultimate and your "Graphics Utililty". At this point, it would be wise to go the support.hp.com and enter your laptop Tag#, go to Drivers and Downloads for your model; change your OS under Windows version, and see if they have driver support for Win7 Ultimate. If they do, check to see if they have a newer version of the "Graphics Utility" specifically made for Win7 Ultimate (newer than the Win7 Home version that came on your laptop). If the newer version of the Utility corrects the problem and works with Ultimate; you can then repeat that process on your original hard drive after apply the Ultimate upgrade to it, and be reasonably certain that utility will work in Ultimate!
Again, if you can't get any kind of answer from HP support or just don't want to deal with a phone call and long hold time; you can do my 2nd hard drive upgrade test, it will give you a good idea of whether this is even possible or not.
If you do the upgrade, let us know your result so we can share with other forum users.
<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>
