Windows 7 Beta Released To Public After Delay

Z80xxc! writes "The Windows 7 Beta release is now available for download by the general public, in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Microsoft had previously announced availability around 3 PM PST on Friday, but after unexpected numbers of people proved to be interested in the download, had to postpone it to add more servers."

Comments

Re:Why 32-bit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Intel's Atom CPU is 32-bit, and Microsoft wants 7 to be on netbooks too.

One of the coolest features...

[Richard_at_work]

Boot from a virtual disk (VHD) without virtualising -

http://it-experts.dk/blogs/rsj/archive/2009/01/01/booting-windows-7-from-a-vhd-file.aspx

After playing with it for a day or so, I think Libraries are interesting but I need to play with them some more before committing. The taskbar is nice, and works well - several of the 'cute' features are well thought out, such as the 'Show Desktop' functionality now being a small sliver of the taskbar on the right hand side, which if you hover over makes all windows 100% translucent, and if you click it minimises everything. Each 'window preview' on an application instance icon in the task bar does something similar if you hover on it - only keeps that apps windows opaque. Nice.

It seems very stable - the installer was the Windows 2008 one, it literally asks what language you want, where you want it installed and do you want to upgrade or fresh install. Then its away and installing - everything else is done afterward.

IE8 has issues on this website - lots of refreshing to a blank page for seemingly no reason. Not ready for the prime time - Chrome and Firefox work fine though.

One thing that struck me, and other people I have talked about, is that due to the focus on icons for the task bar now (instead of the label, as Win95 to Vista uses), some people are really going to have to polish their icons (Putty - the icon is nice when its small, but it sucks at larger sizes - at the moment Im using the Kterm icon for Putty!).

While I cant say Ive heavily stress tested it, theres been no show stoppers for me as of yet. I'm currently using it as my main desktop (aside from my OSX systems), so we shall see how we get on in the coming months.

Re:All that trouble...

[halivar]

I'm firmly in favor of the upgrade. iTunes won't work right in Windows XP x64, while it works great in Windows 7. There are a still a few hiccups (it's beta), but it definitely feels like an upgrade.

So far, I've tested the following apps to work perfectly in Windows 7:
- Mozilla Firefox 3.0 (with AdBlock, Flash, and Acrobat Reader)
- Acrobat Reader 9
- GIMP 2.6
- OpenOffice 3
- iTunes (Vista x64)

I can't yet get the drivers for my HP Color LaserJet 2600n working (they're installed, but all tasks are stuck in "pending").

Next up I'm going to install VisualStudio 2K8 and see how that works.

Re:two license keys

[mobby_6kl]

It looks like they're assigning keys from a small pool so they're not unique for each person/installation. Both the 32 and 64 bit ISOs are also everywhere, so you can grab any torrent (the hashes match) and then try to register with one of the following keys:

7XRCQ-RPY28-YY9P8-R6HD8-84GH3
RFFTV-J6K7W-MHBQJ-XYMMJ-Q8DCH
482XP-6J9WR-4JXT3-VBPP6-FQF4M
D9RHV-JG8XC-C77H2-3YF6D-RYRJ9
JYDV8-H8VXG-74RPT-6BJPB-X42V4

4HJRK-X6Q28-HWRFY-WDYHJ-K8HDH
QXV7B-K78W2-QGPR6-9FWH9-KGMM7
6JKV2-QPB8H-RQ893-FW7TM-PBJ73
GG4MQ-MGK72-HVXFW-KHCRF-KW6KY
TQ32R-WFBDM-GFHD2-QGVMH-3P9GC

Of course, the public beta won't get you any free stuff from MS for bug reports so you might as well just rearm it a couple of times and then get the RTM version or install GNU/Linux in disgust.

direct download links

[innocent_white_lamb]

Direct download links:

32-bit
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.ISO

64-bit
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.ISO

I don't get it

[Arancaytar]

Why is this story tagged "hitler"?

xkcd WHAT?

Re:I don't get it

[snikulin]

Sight...

Re:All that trouble...

[Richard_at_work]

Visual Studio 2008 seems to work perfectly - everyone of my projects (C#, .net 3.5) compile and run fine.

Re:As usual

[cowbutt]

The URI for the ISO is in the page source.

Re:Released to public after delay?

[AsmordeanX]

Hah.

Bandwidth wasn't an issue at all for the downloads. The product key and website side of it was. I downloaded the 64bit client from Microsoft at noon yesterday in the middle of the feeding frenzy and still pulled it down at 1200KB/s which is the cap on my connection.

A torrent would not have solved it yesterday.

Long Mode is so overrated

[DragonHawk]

"I still can't believe there will be a 32-bit version."

I still can't believe people's obsession with Long Mode.

Well, actually, I can, simply because 64 is larger than 32, and thus 64-bit equates to "better" in the eyes of lots of people. But lots of people are fools, too.

But seriously, the majority of computer users have absolutely no need for Long Mode. They do things like browse the web, forward email, watch YouTube, and look at porn. You barely need Protected Mode for that.

The scenarios benefiting from Long Mode would be:

• Servers
• IT lab/admin types who want to run multiple concurrent VMs with large memories
• Engineering workstation users who actually need to work with datasets larger than 2^32 bytes (4 GiB)

That's about it, really.

Most people are concerned solely with the amount of memory Windows reports in the System Properties dialog, and get their panties in a bunch over 700 MB or so of "missing" RAM. While I can understand wanting one's OS to be able to use all the RAM one paid for, most of these people aren't actually ever going to use that much of RAM. They just want their number to be bigger, because that obviously reflects on the size of their testicles. That's why they bought 4 GiB of RAM in the first place.

But even then, Long Mode is not needed to win the penis-length contests. Proper support for PAE would solve the problems. Just about any Intel-compatible CPU made in the past ten years supports PAE. With PAE, the processor can directly address up to 64 GiB of RAM in i386 Protected Mode, even though each user task (process) is still limited to a 4 GiB virtual address space. But it's very rare for a single task to actually need that much.

Of course, on Win i386, it's a little worse than that. Processes are limited to 2 GiB of user address space (with the kernel having the same 2 GiB in every process). But even 2 GiB is a lot of memory. Even Firefox only needs half a gig or so. ;-)

Win i386 actually uses PAE, sort-of. It needs to obtain the NX (No Execute) bit in page tables, for "DEP" (Data Execution Prevention). But Win i386 still limits physical addresses to under 4 GiB to keep crappy drivers from crashing the system. Since Microsoft's all about driver signing these days, they could just add an flag to the driver signature indicating it's qualified to work above 4 GiB, and have an OS boot option or something which allowed all memory to be used. Refuse to load PAE unqualified drivers in that mode.

Meanwhile, Long Mode is not without drawbacks. Long Mode, for those who don't know, is the processor mode AMD introduced which enables native 64-bit virtual addressing. But when in Long Mode, the processor can't do 16-bit Virtual Mode at all. There's still a lot of Win16 code floating around in the Windows world, sadly. Long Mode also means potential compatibility issues with crappy 32-bit code. Sure, it's crappy code, but I've found most code is crappy code. There can be performance costs, too (64-bit everywhere means more stuff than 32-bit most places), although they're minor and may be offset by equally possible performance gains (instruction architecture improvements such as more general-purpose registers).

Since this is Slashdot, I have to mention that Linux i386 supports PAE just fine, and has no problem working with more than 4 GiB of RAM, making Linux x86-64 even less interesting than Win x86-64. Linux also doesn't manage memory the same way as Windows, so the user/kernel split doesn't apply. So Linux x86-64 has all the compatibility problems of Long Mode, with even fewer benefits.

Re:Long Mode is so overrated

[YesIAmAScript]

I'm more interested in the extra registers that you code can assume exists on 64-bit x86s. Also, managing a larger than 32-bit addressing space in 32-bit mode can lead to a lot of extra instructions, since you can't use 64-bit registers to hold the data.

So yeah, I'm interested in 64-bit mode. Because it should help my machine run more efficiently. And Vista and Windows 7 don't support Win16 apps, so it isn't going to be a problem that win16 cannot use a hardware acceleration mode while running in 64-bit mode.

In the end, your argument is simply "why do we need 64-bit mode, we can do anything we want in 32-bit mode with a little extra work". Yeah, that's true about 16-bit mode too. It can do everything 32-bit mode can do (even without protected mode), and yet we switched away from 16-bit to 32-bit.

64-bit mode is on the rise because apps and OSes are starting to creak a bit with the limitations of 32-bit mode, and programmers being lazy beasts, would rather just change a compile option instead of write a bunch of paged data management code (a la EMS,XMS,EEMS and the old DOS extenders).

Re:Still no virtual desktop

[techmuse]

Not true. This was explicitly requested (and rejected by MS VP in charge of Windows Steve Sinofsky) on the Engineering Windows 7 blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/ (I can't find the exact place where he said they weren't going to do it right now, but he did say so). It won't be happening in Windows 7. Sorry.

That is because..

[Junta]

MS is typically paranoid about really really old OSes, and uses a layout with a iso9660 visible file:
mount -t iso9660 -o loop 7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.iso t
[root@localhost Download]# ls t
readme.txt
[root@localhost Download]# umount t
[root@localhost Download]# mount -t udf -o loop 7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.iso t
[root@localhost Download]# ls t
autorun.inf bootmgr efi sources upgrade
boot bootmgr.efi setup.exe support

Re:What web browsers support the Windows 7 Beta do

[fr4nk]

wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.ISO

Also: got full speed on my connection during the entire download.

Re:All that trouble...

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Vista ended the year with 21% of the desktop, up 8% in from February.
[..]
But those who are in the market are most buying Vista.

And what's the "Forced Upgrade" percent in that? I bought a new laptop in June. It shipped with Vista. Am I in that 21% even though I've booted to it a grand total of 6 times and haven't booted to it since August or so? I "bought" a Vista license, but only because I was forced to.

I tried to return my Vista license. Circuit City, after having to call two or three other Regional Managers (not the lowly multi-store supervisors, corporate managers) told me they refused to give me the money owed for a Vista License. I showed the Store Manager the EULA that states in the very first paragraph that I can return it to the store of purchase for a full refund. They refused to honor it. They said I had to go to Microsoft. After calling Microsoft three times (their server kept hanging up on me...), told me they wouldn't honor it since it states I have to go to the store of purchase.

Guess what. Circuit City, after I told them all that, told me "O-Well" (yes a direct quote), and hung up.

So now I'm in the 21% of Vista License holders?!? Pfffft... That's just corporate spreadsheet fixing...