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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."
Because Intel's Atom CPU is 32-bit, and Microsoft wants 7 to be on netbooks too.
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.
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.
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:
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
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
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.
Sight...
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.
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.