Windows 7 beta to be available through Feb. 10
Microsoft announced Friday night that computer enthusiasts will have a while longer to get their hands on the beta version of Windows 7.
In a blog posting, Microsoft said that the test version of the operating system will be available for download through February 10. Previously, Microsoft had said that the OS would only be open through late this month.
The betta tsh, the unofficial mascot of the Windows 7 beta.
"We are at a point where we have more than enough beta testers and feedback coming in to meet our engineering needs, so we are beginning to plan the end of general availability for Windows 7 Beta," Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc said in the blog posting. "Because enthusiasm continues to be so high for the Windows 7 Beta and we don't want anyone to miss out, we will keep the Beta downloads open through February 10th."
Those who start the download process before February 10 will have until February 12 to finish the task.
The deadline applies to the general public, while members of Microsoft's TechNet and MSDN developer programs will continue to have access to the code, LeBlanc said.
CEO Steve Ballmer announced the beta of Windows 7 during his speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 7. After a slight hiccup, Microsoft made the code available on January 10.
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
So everybody expecting a Xp type of product
BUT MS seriously screwed up bad with Vista
they took 6 years to make a OS thats slower,buggier and less productive
Fingers crossed for Windows 7 though, it looks good enough to replace XP
Although I still think MS needs Real competition in the OS space
or we might still have Vista type of let downs in the future
But it's still much worse than WinXP for most casual tasks! It takes a huge number of clicks to get where you want, everything's hidden behind an inane "web browser" like experience, the controls look amateurish, and the new task bar is significantly less useful than XP's.
In short, I see the XP black market continuing strong until Win8.
If the newer builds are better than the current one I don't see why you would want to keep using the older builds save for nostolgia purposes..
Vista had 2 RCs.
MS has stated that this will be the only beta (Notice this betas is not called "Beta 1" like Vista's beta), and from the looks of it(yes I have tried it myself), it's ready to go RC with some tweaks,but 7 Beta is much more functional than Vista Beta 1 . When is the question.
I am running the public beta as well and I don't see anywhere it says release candidate like it did in Vista RC1/RC2. Furthermore, this *beta* clearly notes when you run winver that it will expire in July. Considering that Microsoft isn't going to ship until the end of the year at the earliest and since we know Microsoft isn't going to spend 6 months between finalizing the gold code and releasing the product that seems to indicate that there should be at least one additional beta regardless of whether it is a public release or not. Merely because this may be the final public beta doesn't mean that Microsoft won't have any further beta builds that are available internally or at the very least available through MSDN users.
BTW, beta 1(build 7000) is no longer the latest build anymore. It showed up torrent sites over a month before it showed up on Microsoft's public servers. Several sites have shown screenshots of newer builds(eg. build 7025). Just because build 7000 might be last public beta doesn't mean that it is the last build before RTM. I agree with you that Windows 7 is fairly solid, it certainly feels more polished than Vista RTM, but if Microsoft wants to ship a solid product that gets good reviews I think that they are going to spend another 9-10 months zapping showstopper bugs(ie. plenty more beta builds to come) and than give developers ~2-3 months to make sure that developers are prepared to deal with any issues at launch. Even if Microsoft shipped in Windows 7 in November, which I think is optimistic we are still ~7 months of R&D. Just because they don't release any new public betas, which may very well be the case because public bug reports often aren't very valuable, they still will make dozens of new internal builds before RTM.
I imagine shortly after February 10th they probably wouldn't even want bug reports for build 7000 anymore because they don't want too many bug reports for fixed issues. Just like the Mozilla project past a certain point they aren't going to be interested in bugs on old builds anymore because so many things have changed that most of the bugs you find have already been fixed in a newer build.
Also, apart from lots of PR< what does Microsoft hope to achieve through a public beta if they don't have a public bugtracker?
you think he's 12? Wow, I wouldn't have gone past 8.
You seem like the demographic Microsoft is shooting for.
personally, the only thing i have by apple is a nano, otherwise everything they have, from macs to software, is an overpriced campain targeting those who either hate the corporate image of microsoft or are simply not confident enough to use windows due to the propaganda spread about vista, which is enough to rival the presidential election.
apple=overpriced. and for those of us who want more for the money in an ever-declining economy, windows is a better solution. im running vista now, and even if its a bit buggy, problems are more than able to be fixed. windows 7 promises to be a much stable, faster, more reliable platform. hopefully microsoft learned from its mistakes and will gain its respect back.
"Hey PC, i heard your new OS, which hasn't even been released, has a bunch of bugs!"
"Hey Mac, i heard you're a ******!"
we can't use windows 7 or what
Beyond a certain point, bug reports for old builds become rather useless because at some point most of the bugs that you find will have already been fixed in a newer build. For example, with Mozilla every bug report automatically attaches the build #s and if the build number is too old they will ask you to download a new build to verify that the bug still exists. If you have been involved in ANY type of beta whether it is Microsoft or another vendor you should realize that they often purposely put in expiration dates for that reason.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Microsoft-Windows-7/39012423321
I have to disagree. Windows 7 is a lot more then a service pack for Windows Vista. Have you even used Windows 7 Beta?
Lets see what is different I can think of off the top of my head:
Taskbar, Home networking, personalization of the desktop, faster and less bloated, WordPad and Paint both have updated user interfaces, caculator has finally been updated, help system is better in Windows 7.
I am sure there is more but this is just off the top.
actually winY2K remains "king" in our humble opinion when it comes to all windoze OS's on the desktop. This OS is not only the fastest out of the Microsoft camp but (arguably) the most robust as well.
but the real king of the desktop is ubuntu. its ONLY (current) weakness is multimedia. however every version (which is introduced on a regular six month schedule) shows considerable improvement in this area over prior versions. quite frankly (outside the aforementioned multimedia) anything you can do in windoze you can do quicker, a LOT cheaper, and a lot more robust within ubuntu.
and the learning curve (even for a newbie that knows nothing regarding bits and bytes) is not any steeper than someone that has never seen windoze nor the MAC. most common apps on windoze also runs (under "wine") faster under ubuntu. Updates are a snap (and everything gets updated on your sys not just the OS) and for the most part "driver searches" are a thing of the past.
yes one does need to know something about "partitions" as this OS needs to be installed by YOU (or someone more familiar with the "innards" than you may be). however by no means does it take a brain surgeon to figure all this out. besides. we believe the world at large is going the open-source route... its just a matter of time. firefox is taking over the planet regarding browsers (and why not?.. IE has absolutely NO advantages and a LOT of disadvantages). Office has NO advantages over openOffice.. and the list goes on... once again these products are updated on a much quicker time frame than Microsoft updates. jack be nimble jack be quick! and that's what ubuntu represents. oh. you can download it... then burn the resultant iso. you'd probably have to do something similar regarding the W7 beta.
I like OpenOffice.org, but I gotta admit that it is slow as can be and despite dramatic improvements it still isn't quite 100% compatible with MS Office. For most average users OpenOffice is a great solid option, but if document exchange with newer versions of Office is important OpenOffice still isn't quite there. OpenOffice has made decent inroads by getting ODF adopted as an ISO standard, but they are going to need to improve their OOXML support in order for them to make good inroads in the corporate world that is still very much MS friendly(ie. any non Microsoft product is going to need virtually perfect support of OOXML to get adopted). Overall OpenOffice is a better product (eg. cross-platform, free, etc.), but I think you don't know what you are talking about if you say that there are no advantages of MS Office.
I am optimistic of the future of open source, but I think I realize that open source has more real obstacles to overcome than you are talking about.
Altho I totally agree that OpenOffice is fine and I have used it since pretty much when it first came out, I unfortunately on many occasions had it misbehave when I try to convert MS Office documents or spreadsheets so for some it is not totally practical.
On a last note FireFox is fine, I started using it because it had tabbed browsing but I have to install IE tab for the few sites I do visit that require Internet Explorer and one of the only reasons I do like FireFox still is because I do a lot of work online and need the spell check that is built into it. Judging by your many misspelled Windows in your post you don't use it.
The point is what works for you may not work for all and it's totally unfair to say for even most Ubuntu would be an easy thing to convert to..
Heh - can't blame 'em, though.
Could it be the positive reaction to 7 has you a little concerned? What happens if people like it? What if Apple doesn't gain share? What if your predictions of Microsoft's doom were premature (this has been predicted for the past 20 years)?
No worries...you can still come on and try to incite people with your posts...we know how important that is to you.
I know "clean installs" are preferred, but as someone with a ton of applications on my system, it would take me an extra couple of days just to reinstall all my software.
Considering that Windows 7 won't ship for 9 months at the earliest I imagine it is simply disabled in the current builds and that Microsoft will iron out any issues that exist with upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7. Considering that there are still millions of people who haven't upgraded to Vista yet I think the opinions of XP users will prove important to the success of Windows 7 and first impressions will be important. That being said *most* people are never going to upgrade an old machine anyways. They will simply buy a new computer with Windows 7 preinstalled. In that sense the upgrade issue may not be as important as you think.
Two points to make here:
1.While i believe Linux is a nice alternative for us techie types, the average joe would pop a vain if they didn't see their beloved windows desktop, sure the NETBOOK Market has a leeway into linux, but seriously, do you think this will bring linux to the masses....... i think not.
2. Lastly Windows XP prior to Service Pack 2 had more security holes than a swiss cheese, once SP2 arrived things got way better, read MS rewrote 90% of it, we almost had to pay for it as ms considered renaming XP into a R2 version, although they kinda of did that with MEDIA CENTER 2005. Nonetheless Windows 7 seems to be getting better reviews for a beta, but i caution you to wait till the code goes final so that final judgement is passed. Furthermore i almost am certain UNDUNSOME has some older hardware he's hanging onto, why? i dont know, but we all have reasons, however dont bash an o/s if you havent event played with it.
one more thing...
on a single core PENTIUM M 1.7GHZ, 2GB laptop i have Vista Home premium running, with just the side bar off, so there, now at SP1 i must say vista is quite the os.
Sincerely
Techyworks
Just my 2 cents.
Must be nice to have ignorance about OSX, eh? ;)
I have tried to download WIndows 7 beta 4 different times and on different computers I really would like to try it out but cant get it to download from MS site does anyone know where i can get it elsewhere or if their is something im doing wrong
Thanks
- by eraser23 January 29, 2009 1:26 AM PST
- guys helloo.. ineed product key for win7 please ..thanks guys
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