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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!
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.
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.
The public beta will be out May 5th. Paying for MSDN or Technet gets you early access. I wouldn't have a Technet account except my work got it as part of their MS license deal.
-- "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" -Optimus Prime
...waiting for blue face of death...
rewriting history since 2109
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/
"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."
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.
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.
...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.
It amazes me what passes for funny around here.
Similes are like metaphors
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
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.