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Windows 7 Will Be Free For a Year
Barence writes "Microsoft is effectively giving away Windows 7 free for a year with the launch of the Release Candidate. The Release Candidate is now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, and will go on unlimited, general release on 5 May. The software will not expire until 1 June 2010, giving testers more than a year's free access to Windows 7. 'It's available to as many people who see fit to use it, although we wouldn't recommend it to just your average user,' John Curran, director of the Windows Client Group told PC Pro. 'We'd very strongly encourage anyone on the beta to move to the Release Candidate.'"
Sounds like a good idea to me! Can't think of anything wrong with it, but I trust someone will come up with something.
You just got troll'd!
It's just one more step to open source! I'll start holding my breath now!
Well it will take me at least a year to get all my drivers updated and installed, so this really doesn't help me.
Will this include XP as a VM for a year as well?
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
MSDN and technet require very expensive subscriptions (never mind the absurdity of paying to test another companies apps)
and does this apply to the public beta testers who dont have the luxury of handing over thousands to test Microsofts apps ?
This could be Ballmer's strategy against Linux as he repeatedly has said that you can't beat Linux' price.
With this they will surely retain the market share, in a recession, for an otherwise very expensive product; it costs more than one third of a new pc.
Your 4-year-old's account shouldn't have administrator access.
If you gave his account administrator access, neither should you.
Funny you should say that. A while ago I took my four year old daughter to a museum, and let her play with a touch-screen information terminal. In a couple of seconds she (somehow) had control panel up! It may take a thousand monkeys a million years to write Shakespeare, but it seems to take ten seconds for a four-year old to find any "backdoor access" or other options that should not be available.
It sounds like you don't like the idea. It's good that you're not forced to take them up on it.
Unsuccessful troll is unsuccessful.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
*sigh*
At least pick an addictive drug next time.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
"Microsoft is effectively giving away Windows 7 free for a year with the launch of the Release Candidate.
It's only free if you don't value bug fixes, security updates, product support and potentially all manner of issues installing software that will be released for Windows 7 RTM on a pre-release version no-one will have done significant product testing on and won't care to help you with if you run into problems.
Keeping all this in mind, and the fact this is pre-release development code, it's not hard to see why this release is free. I do find it odd that it's got such a generous expiration date, but approaching this as a free (time-limited) lunch is probably a fairly bad idea for all the reasons above.
If you like it, but don't want to pay for it, just pirate it. You'll be better off, and so may many others when they don't have to worry about your compromised box congesting their network, because it was exploited by a flaw MS has no intention of fixing in pre-release code.
Actually the Win7 RC doesn't have any path to the full, licenced version of Win7 at the end of the testing period, because it's released for testing, not as a freebie.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Absolutely love this on today's BBC article on Windows 7. "We were able to shave 400 milliseconds off the shutdown time by slightly trimming the WAV file shutdown music. "It's indicative of really the level and detail and scrutiny on Windows 7."
Weed isn't addicting in the physical sense that you are probably referring to. I have stopped for years when necessary with no trouble. The drug you are looking for is crack/meth/coke.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Windows a gateway drug?
No it's more of a Dell drug.
This is actually a wonderful idea for them. it lowers the barrier for the transition. Even companies can push their costs forward in time.
But i'm thinking of all the pirates in asia. The street vendors with virus laden bootlegs will be competing against free. this will hurt their market. Then a year later what will the chinese consumer do? He could go out an buy a bootleg and re-install his system or he could buy a keycode and continue with his current system state. in many cases the idea of re-installing a system would be daunting enough to suddenly make the key code seem cheap.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Microsoft isn't concerned about "hooking" people. They accomplished that decades ago. Microsoft's problem is that people are hooked on XP. They spent a whackload of money on Vista, and nobody went for it. (By nobody, I mean corporations. Everybody who bought a new machine was forced to get it, but even then many switched back to XP.) Now, they've spent another whackload of money on Win7, and they want corporations to buy it. They want people to move off of the XP platform. This free windows is the bait to get them to switch.
Frankly, I don't know if it'll work. Windows XP works fine. It's an operating system. All it has to do is run applications and manage resources. It does that well enough for most people and corporations, so why switch?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
They're just scared to death that no one will upgrade, just like with Vista. They probably hope that if enough people are trying for free at home, they'll want it at work and on their next computer. Then they might be able to finally sunset XP.
One more reason why every family computer geek should stress the importance of regular backups, especially before taking major steps like upgrading one's operating system.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
So Microsoft's OS division is now reduced to copying the business plan of heroin dealers?
Why save your soul when you can sell it for a profit?
If I install Windows 7 RC on anything, it'll be a virtual machine. If I get downgraded, I just kill the VM, and no harm done.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Who doesn't keep all their data on a seperate drive these days? I mean yeah I download crap to the desktop to filter later, but anything I might keep for more than 60 days is immediately saved to the D: drive. Virus? No problem, just reinstall windows + specific apps. 2 hours down the drain, but you know your virus problem is nixed. Windows 7 RC expired? Just re-install XP.
moox. for a new generation.
A story about Windows is posted on Slashdot and all the comments are usless dribble about M$ being buggy and instable. I think I see a parrallel between the way the media is covering the Swine Flu and how Linux users cover Windows stories...Can we please stay on topic here...
What is the (anti)benefit of a company putting out a beta like this for a long period of time?
I installed Linux and I feel so much better now.
Dennis Leary
They're not giving you Windows 7 for free. They allow anyone to use a beta version of Windows 7 for one year. And, yes, RC is still beta. Microsoft has admitted that they falsely and intentionally label the last few betas as RCs to make hardware vendors to test their hardware and write proper drivers before a RTM build is created.
The only purpose of this /. submission is to make money on ads or something I suppose (I didn't follow any link, I confess, as I don't follow misleading and moronic articles).
Please ask her to document it. ;-)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
What if the virus killed your files on D drive? You should always keep a copy externally, preferably at a remote location.
That sounds like your own mistake. XP install allows you to format only one partition. You must have messed up by not choosing the proper options during the install.
This space for rent.
Depends how you smoke it. Often people mix cannabis with tobacco and end up addicted to nicotine. They often then believe that the craving is for for a while cannabis, until they discover that a normal cigarette will work just as well. I know a few people who got hooked on smoking like this, which makes one wonder why tobacco is legal and cannabis isn't.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
as previously pointed out the public launch is on May 5th, which will not require a MSDN subscription to access the RC.
Um, they did the same thing with Vista. The RC was public and came with a year expiration also.
Not only that, but going to the launch expos they had across the country, they passed out free Vista "RTM" discs (confusing because it was not the actual OEM or retail disc) with another year license (plus a full license to Office 2k7).
Ah, I see.
So basically, it isn't a release candidate as there is no chance of it being released 'as is'.
No wonder people don't trust their programming, they can't even get the terminology right.
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
Well then I guess you should have kept all your files secretly backed up on your C, E and F drives along with terrestrial and orbital off site backups. I recommend two satellites orbiting on opposite sides of the earth, that way your data is less likely to be corrupted in the event of solar flares(!).
moox. for a new generation.
...when you give something away for free, and people don't want it anyway. ^^
(Ignore their obviously coming "OMFG! It sells like crazy!!1!one(lim x->0 ((sin x)/x))" messages. They did that with Vista too. And look how it turned out.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
...they will pay me to install Windows on my box. I might be interested in that.
Reply to That ||
Give a regular user a choice between free* Windows and Free* Linux, and they will choose Windows in a heartbeat.
This is designed to get users to upgrade from WinXP to Win7 and not to Linux
No sig for the moment.
I'm quite impressed with it.
It's a huge step up from vista.
I particularly like the action center.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Microsoft already had me at "Mark Russinovich is windows 7 principal architect".
I was given that 'june 1st' date, but it was supposed to be june 1st 2009, not 2010.
Background goes black on june 1st, and starting july 1st, reboot each two hours. (insert bluescreen joke here)
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
I think this not-switching thing won't happen. 7 is worlds better than that steaming pile o'Vista.
It's actually fast, as crazy as this sounds.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
The RC is only available via TechNet/MSDN until Tuesday. After that it's available to the general public.
Damn straight.
I have 7 RC installed on a very very very underpowered Lenovo laptop, the kind of thing that ran Ubuntu with a struggle. 7 however, is very fluid, even the fancypants aero effects, with the transparencies work.
I think Microsoft just may be onto the next XP here.
First you say:
I see absolutely no problem
and then you say:
I ended up an engineer
Seems like a dire enough consequence to me.
How about instead of saying "Unknown Partition", make a driver that allows read access to the FS drivers in the linux kernel?
MS: Linux may have been good for you, but we provide you the tools to migrate your data back to a "Complete MS Solution". We support all fileystems that Linux can read and write to, along with BASH scripting and posix programs by default. We also run a Linux compat layer, like BSD, so we can run native ELF executables without changing.
but no.
they are not giving Windows 7 for free. /. can't seem to write decent titles.
none
So basically, it isn't a release candidate as there is no chance of it being released 'as is'.
Dude, as someone that downloaded the Kubuntu 9.04 RC then apt-get'd to the release a week later I can tell you there was a snowflake's chance in hell it'd be released "as-is". While I'm sure most of the changes were minor, there were tons of packages that were updated. After a release you have patching going on and I find it very natural that the same happens between RC and release, even more so to get patches in before the release. Even if a beta release was feature complete something it rarely is, there tends to be huge patches and regressions going in between beta and release. RC is to me the big "fixes only beyond this point", if it works in the RC it shall not break in the release. Tiny fixes still go in but no major new patches, no regressions, no messing with what works. If you need to fix something do it in the most minimal way and leave the "right way" of fixing it for the next release..
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What they really need is to get people to stop replacing it with an older version, and to stop trying to get the older one on their new hardware.
Vista is approaching a 25% share of the market.
Top Operating System Share Trend
It's easy to imagine a 10% decline in XP's share and a 10% increase in Vista's share May-to-May.
The geek looks in the mirror and thinks that he is representative of the mass consumer market.
The HP desktop from WalMart is quad core and ships with 6 GB RAM and 64 Bit Vista. In six months - nine months, whatever - it will be an i7 with 9 GB RAM.
Serious horsepower at a mass market price. Mature 64 bit drivers. Win 7 just around the corner.
What's not to love?
Dual-core is Coming Soon to a netbook near you. It won't be long before XP stops making sense even at entry level.
Let me just quote the comments from this thread:
MSDN and technet require very expensive subscriptions
Technet is 349.00 for the first year / 249.00 per year after that. That isn't expensive.
You counter his argument that it is not free by pointing out it is MERELY 250 bucks a year...
Who would have thought FREE would become such a complex concept to some people.
I don't know where you've seen the word "free" in GGP, because it wasn't there. He said "expensive". $250/year is hardly expensive, but that's beside the point anyway, since it's not what you've taken issue with.
Please mod parent Offtopic.
I don't know what the relevant stats are to be honest, but I'm pretty sure that some 80% to 90% of software development these days is for web based apps, i.e. backend and browser. People got burnt so often by developing for propietry platforms in the past, and I don't only mean Microsoft by that, that I think that client OS development is truly becoming somewhat irrelevant.
Microsoft knows this and tried so many times to lock people into its own web platform technologies, be that ActiveX, IE, Silverlight, XAML etc. But it never worked. The web is no longer Microsoft's backyard and people are tired of being forced to either cow to Microsoft, Apple or Adobe.
Personally, I'm glad and it's abaout time.