Windows 7 beta available for download Jan 9th

Softpedia

Now, remember folks, this "IS" a beta.
Don't upgrade your current OS.
Make a seperate partion or better yet use a completly different hard drive.

This will give people a first hands on look at the new OS.
Being a beta, it may not be as fast or stable as the final release.

D'oh, here is the download link for the 9th.
www.microsoft.com...




[edit on 1/8/2009 by mrmonsoon]

Excellent advice Mon. Upgrading it will gimp your computer bigtime.

I ran it in a virtual machine for a day or 2 before loading it on an empty raptor i had laying around. After 3 days of running it, (forgot i had a vista choice on my bootloader, lol) I whacked my main drives and loaded it. Ive been running it exclusively on my main rig and laptop for a week and all i can say is HOT DAM. Bout time M$ got a another rockin OS on the blocks.

go read this thread and laff at some of the so-called "info" being thrown around in there.

Breaking news Win 7

Silver

There was such an extreme rush to get the beta of win 7, it crashed their servers.

They pulled the links until they can get "A LOT" more servers from M$ and otherwise to handle the load.

The have 1.5 million keys, and that is expected to be gone in 3-5 days, if not sooner.

MSDN Subscription for the win buddy.

For everyone that downloads the torrent and wants to run it more than 30 days, you can type slmgr -rearm in an Administrative cmd prompt. It resets the activation wizard for another 30 days and you can do this 3 times. So you can get 4 months out of a regular load without a key if you desire.

Hope that helps some.

Silver

Not going to make a stab at vista here.

Anyway... I'll stick to rolling back to XP and getting a separate boot of Linux for the time being.

I just installed it on a virtual machine.

First impressions are good, specially the time it took to install, 15 minutes (using a ISO image instead of the hardware DVD reader)!

I hadn't the time to see much more than the start menu and the new task-bar buttons.

That other thread became outrageous, man oh man.

Anywhoooo, im still running it as my one and only OS both on my laptop and here on this rig and im still impressed. I was initially a little worried after i put the key in. It wanted to install 20 or so new updates.... First thought, oh crap here comes the gimping.

But alas, my worries were for not. This system has had zero problems, hiccups, errors and its a beta, go figure. The programs that didnt work, which were very few, and i dont blame MS, is ones that didnt recognize the OS or put in a driver that isnt supported under win7. I either ran them in vista compatibility mode or a google search found me alternatives to those programs and everything is running smoothly, error free, quickly and beautifully i might add. The way a system of this caliber should with a platform to match. Please oh please dont let the marketing guys screw this one up by bloating it to hell.

My laptop actually seems to be getting a little more batt life since it doesnt take 20 minutes (exaggeration of course) to boot XP. No way in hell i was gonna put vista on that rig, its bout 5yrs old now. 1.5g pentium mobile, gig of ram and 100g hdd. regular onboard graffix but i use it for wifi sniffing, configurating, field work stuff so i wouldnt wanna game on it anyways. But running Win7 is great. It has no problem at all actually running the OS and whadya know, being able to run more than one or 2 programs with out coming to a screeching halt.

Dam that was a rant and a half...LOLOL

Im a "PC" and i wrote this, happily, on Windows 7 using Firefox.

**Disclaimer** I, in no way, recieved money from Bill Gates or MS for that commercial i just blatantly gave them(but it wouldnt hurt $$). I just thought it was funny.

Silver

I have to agree, using it now it is really impressive, considering this machine doesn't even have a full GB of RAM and works quite nicely. Apparently it is using a reasonable amount of memory, so I'm not complaining considering it's running Aero as well.

The sad thing is Apex, this should be the Vista fix. Don't make us shell out for a new OS 1-2yrs later. I guess we gotta feed the corporate pig though.

Im a PC and im STILL posting...........from Windows 7

Silver