- Sunday, 29 November 2009
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One finger in the throat and one in the rectum makes a good diagnostician - Sir William Osler
Windows 7 beta is over
MICROSOFT HAS CLOSED THE DOOR on its Windows 7 beta test programme and is no longer allowing new downloads.
A notice on the site says anyone in the middle of an interrupted download would be allowed to finish and that members of the company's MSDN and Technet services would still be able to gain access, but the rest of the world was shut out.
Originally limited to just 2.5 million users, Redmond lifted the cap after unprecedented demand for the beta.
Microsoft isn't saying how many of the fully functional beta operating systems were actually downloaded but we'd bet it's a pretty big number. Add to that the amount of times it has been distributed outside of Microsoft's legal download framework, on P2P networks and through good old disk swapping and it will be an exponentially bigger number.
Now all Microsft has to do is collect the data from those millions of unpaid testers and, if the software behemoth actually listens to its users this time, we may even end up with a half decent operating system.
Miracles do happen. µ
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there are torrents...
Microsoft will see W7 usage continue to grow as more and more people get it from the Pirate Bay and such.
I know I tried getting mine from the official d/l site, but it took me about 15 mins to get it from the bay...
...half-decent. I just hope they don't break it before release. FYI, I've used every MS OS since MS-DOS v5.0, and I couldn't use Vista for any length of time before the SP2 beta. So my liking W7 beta 1 means something. My continuing to like it after release, should they actually manage not to break it, will mean at least 150 extra installations of W7. Probably many more, given how many machines I support "on the side".
Well to be honest its just Vista with a slightly jazzier front end, its still got all the annoyed Vista "features".
I stopped using the beta after a week or so I think M$ are doing a great marketing job on W7 as everyone seems to think its great. Its not great its just vista.
... bother reporting back to MS? Because it really is a bother to see on top of each window the send feedback link. And the watermark at the bottom... just annoying... and let's face it - win7 is a stable enough OS to feel annoyed by these things. Well, truth be told, there are tools to remove them, and I can vouch that the 64bits version of win7 that I have both at work and at home is better than any other flavor of Vista I previously tried. In games the performance matches that of XP and the eye-candy is a welcome addition. It might even be the first OS I will purchase...
Call it what it is, Vista that should have been. W7 looks like Vista other then a few dolled up icons. Microsoft is going to laugh all the way to the bank this time round. All their developing cost has been paid for by all the beta testers that bought Vista. They "officially" don't have to support winXP anymore.Their will be a massive movement from xp when a few horrible bugs show up out of the blue. They won't have to worry about spending to much time and money supporting Vista because of the reputation its gotten.
Might be a good time to buy MS shares while they have bottomed out.
Tried it, and uninstalled it within a day, it made my older machine suffer far too much... there is plenty of bugfixing to do before they release it.
I've had it for 2 weeks now and I love it. I've had no problems at all - well ok, just one: Creative don't have Vista drivers for my webcam but with a bit of messing about, I managed to use the XP driver and it doesn't seem to complain.
Like Paul said, it's probably going to be the first OS I actually buy as well. It's a breath of fresh air on my desktop.
Well it is faster than XP ever was on my IBM Thinkpad T42 with just 512M ram. That's with Outlook 2007 running and with Firefox open.
Did all you guys just download the bay version and not register a legit serial with MS? I think so.. No problems with all of the dozen or so updates that has been released for it. Not that it has ever noticeably been buggy or yet to BSOD.
Jimbo, it's slower than what? Windows 95/98/ME?
It'll be the day when Apple does an open beta I guess. Then they did with there first version of OS X! It was as buggy as Vista ever was, until Vista SP1 came out. Yet they had to purchase it. Then what did they get? They got the bug fixes in the next version of OS X, that they had to purchase.
Pirated or not, M$ is still monitoring. Check your Customer Experience Improvement(CEI) settings and CEI scheduled tasks.
I hope they get some more trouble in EU over privacy.
Vista and 7 have massive dev and support costs. XP must be the real profit maker at the moment. I don't understand why they are so desperate to kill it off.
MS must be getting kickbacks from the hardware makers to force us all down the Vista route. It's costing MS money to push Vista, whilst XP is loved, XPis in demand as well as cheap for MS.
What am I missing?