Windows 7 RC Rush Crashes MSDN, TechNet Pages

CWmike writes "Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) and TechNet paid subscribers were supposed to find the 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows 7 RC available for download today. But in a snafu reminiscent of the problems Microsoft had in January when it tried to launch Windows 7 Beta, the download pages for the release candidate were inaccessible, despite numerous attempts over an hour-long span up until about noon Eastern. TechNet and MSDN subscribers were not happy. 'Man, this stinks,' said a user identified as Lyle Pratt, on a TechNet message forum at 10 a.m. ET. 'I can't believe we can still bring MSDN to its knees!' said John Butler, a Microsoft partner. 'Surely, they should be able to deal with this? Not a good advert for Microsoft.' The Windows 7 RC is slated to be available for public download next Tuesday, May 5. Meanwhile, Microsoft said today that the RC would operate until June 2010, for 13 months of free use — a significantly longer time than it did with Vista's previews."

Comments

Windows 7 will be successful

[greekBruin]

If there is so much interest for the RC then it seems that Windows 7 will be VERY successful!

Re:Not thinking

[dimeglio]

MS probably thought nobody would care about Windows 7. Especially with the new series of Apple's I'm a Mac ads.

Microsoft Fakes "the Slashdot Effect"

[remitaylor]

Wow. Microsoft really pwned everyone with this!

Doesn't everyone realize that Microsoft *faked* this crash as a publicity stunt?

Seriously. Who would download Windows 7? And, of those people, who would download it *legally*???

Up and Running

[DaveAtFraud]

Got it from a torrent this morning and now it's up and running in a qemu VM (That's as close as I let Microsoft's bug ladden bloatware get to my hardware). Host OS is a customized CentOS 5.3 installation. Customizations include running a 2.6.28.7 kernel, kvm-84, qemu-0.9.1 and SDL-1.2.13 (and you need gcc 3.x to compile SDL). I'll bump to 2.6.30 if/when I can get HAL working with it.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Up and Running

[DaveAtFraud]

This is posted from IE8 running under W7 under qemu. See my OP for details.

Observations:

- Slower than snot in January.
- Every web page I've tried to load gets the "trouble loading" pop-up.
- It doesn't want to joing my domain (Samba PDC).
- Pretty pictures!
- Windows Defender won't start.
- You have to go into "Advanced Settings" for the display to get to a screen that lets you run the display at 1280x1024 and 16 bit color. Otherwise you top out at 1024x768.

I'll scan the installation with nmap and nessus to see if anything interesting is open.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:Up and Running

[DaveAtFraud]

I can see why you post anonymously with comments as astute as this.

My original post wasn't modded up; my karma gets me what's known as a "Karma Bonus." As to why the rest of my OP is interesting... newer MS OSs won't run under qemu unless you have very current versions of qemu, kvm and SDL. That is, Vista and Server 2008 both won't install; probably the same for W7. This information might save some other folks some time if they'd also rather keep MS products confined to a VM. But if you had any experience with running qemu you would have known that. Sad.

You'll also note that I've followed up with a first few observations of W7 now that I've had a chance to play with it.

Suggest you revert to an OS that fits your skill level... like Microsoft Bob.

Cheers,
Dave