Door shutting on Windows 7 beta

Correction at 10:45 a.m. PST: The ability to start downloading the beta ended at the start of Tuesday.

The clock is ticking for those that want to play around with the Windows 7 beta.

Microsoft issued a late reminder on Monday that people had only until midnight Pacific time to start downloading the operating system.

Those who started their download in time have until 9 a.m. PST Thursday to finish the process, Microsoft has said. Those who went to the site on Tuesday were able to get a product key, but not the code itself.

"We're sorry, but downloads are no longer available," Microsoft says when users click through from the download page.

The betta fish, the unofficial mascot of the Windows 7 beta.

(Credit: CNET News)

Although the beta version will cease being available to the general public, members of Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet developer programs will continue to have access to the code.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the Windows 7 Beta at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. After a slight hiccup, Microsoft made the code available on January 10.

The software maker has said the next test version of Windows 7 will be a near-final "release candidate" version, although it has not said when to expect that to arrive. Officially Microsoft has said that the final version of Windows 7 will come by the end of January 2010, although the company has been aiming to get it done in time to be on PCs that ship for this year's holiday-shopping season.

[The_happy_switcher]

Gosh, it will be missed--NOT. First post?

[sanenazok]

Wow first post, are you like new to the Internets and/or 12?

[Mr. Dee]

Post like those by AppleRocks belongs at Perez Hilton or TMZ. Shows what Mac Users only do on their platform of choice.

[Vegaman_Dan]

With the strong demand for the product, the only thing that had been missing was a childish tantrum from an immature person with nothing better to do than make imbeciic postings... but then you came along and took care of that.

Thanks for stepping up to the plate and filling in where you're needed.

[whizkid454]

The iEye of CNET.

[xcopy]

Come on guys. Give the little animal a chance..This little iSheep wandered away from the herd and got lost in a PC post. It's all alone, doesn't know how to think for itself and may be frightened now that Stevie isn't telling it what to think, what's good and what's bad, and more importantly, what to buy.

I also think the little animal is right in the respect that not all of us want to play with experimental code. Personally, I only have 4 PCs and feel like I'm still beta testing Vista 64....LOL

[RRosal]

Wow, and you guys fed into it by posting more inane comments to an already inane comment. What a waste of time.

[rpupkin]

just followed the link. it gave me a key but says:

"We're sorry, but downloads are no longer available. Here are the Installation Instructions, Release Notes, and FAQ."

[carlg113]

I cant get it either. Looks like is was only available till 12am Tuesday not 11:59pm.

Honest mistake.

My fault for being such a procrastinator.

[rglang]

Surprise - but here it is, 8:35AM on February 10, and according to the Windows 7 website, the download is no longer available! First it wasn't available when it was supposed to be, and now it is no longer available when it is supposed to be.

What gives?

[CrashPad63]

It officially ended today, some 3 weeks after original shutoff time and millions of downloads over the original 2.5 million that got it on the first day.

[Inconnux]

As far as I am concerned all Microsoft OS's are beta until at least SP1. With some its SP2.

[CrashPad63]

MS through this Beta program is light years ahead of OSX for stability. And linux is perpetually in beta.

[Yottskry]

How do you figure that linux is permenantly in beta? They even have stable and unstable branches for the kernel, and distributions make up their own mind about whether to include the bleeding edge or stable version of individual programs.

Plus this means you're not waiting 7 years for the vendor to update the OS like you do with windows. Plus you're not paying for the privelege of beta testing.

Anyway, roll on windows 7 - after the abject failure of Vista I'm looking forward to MS shedding yet more market share, and with Obama looking into open source for the US government it won't be long before they drop to being also-rans.

[CrashPad63]

Who pays for betas? Not I. Not any of the 2 dozen testers I know. It is free to try.

[randydmyers]

I installed Windows 7 on a seperate HD. However, it set up the internet service provider and cut off my secondary PC. I tried every trick I knew to change the settings and failed. Since MS wants only one PC at a time working, and I can not do other things, I removed the drive and went back to my LINUX and Windows XP Pro X64 (Windows Server 2003.) As far as I am concerned, Windows 7 is a dead issue. LINUX Is Far Greater!!!

[sanenazok]

That's a first! I've never had any OS "cut off" the internet service on a second PC. Were you using the PC with Win7 as a router? Sounds like you may not be in the target audience for the beta.

[Pauldarian]

Yes but what flavor of linux do YOU use =-p

[Vegaman_Dan]

Sounds like an end-user caused misconfiguration issue to me.

[rapier1]

Umm... You screwed something up. Something badly. Probably in the router - like giving both machines the same IP address. Maybe you need to learn new tricks.

[heygeo]

Heh... Windows 7 nor Linux can fix stupid

[7aji88]

funny, I thought I was going crazy but sense I installed Win7, my router would go crazy sometimes and cut the internet for other connected devices. :\

[eudefender]

"Microsoft issued a late reminder on Monday that people had only until midnight Pacific time to start downloading the operating system."

Not enough downloads available? ;-)

[CrashPad63]

Hardley the original number was 2.5 miollion, they extended this "party" for a full 3 weeks, with no numerical limit. Do you know of any Apple OS that the same has been done to a beta? Do you know any Apple beta releases?

[stringarray]

The MS OS's need to be tested more as they are designed to support a vast amount of hardware. Apple does not need to do this nearly as much as they don't support a fraction of the hardware MS does. Given this it should be quite obvious why we don't see beta's like this from Apple.

[CrashPad63]

Oh we see Betas from Apple. Tiger, Leopard, and now Snow Leopard soon. All have had huge "compatibility", "driver" and just plain poor coding problems since release. Leopard was patched many more times than Vista, or even XP this last year. Nothing like beta testing your OS on the Public calling it a final release. Oh lest we forget the hardware line too. Ipod, Iphone1.0 and 2.0 IMac and Mac Book

[Mvan87]

CrashPad.

Other than MobileMe, the 2.0 software update, and the 3G iphone. No I cant think of anything

[JEG2006]

Alternatively you could download the code from a torrent anytime between now and the official release date in 2010. But seriously...why would you want to?

[Swimatm]

There is no official release date yet. But it almost certainly will be this year.

[trimeta]

For those of us who've already downloaded and installed it, at what time does the operating system self-destruct? I mean, I'm sure it does, to prevent us from just using it indefinitely.

[rhsc]

the beta stops working on august 10th, i think

[kpgrelling]

Windows 7 Beta 64 Bit downloaded last Friday, Dell D820 Laptop (Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB HD free space on separate partition). No peripherals attached at all. No software loaded beyond Windows 7 DVD.

I had heard all this great stuff that Windows 7 is good enough to ship (Windows Weekly podcast - Paul Thurrott & Leo Laporte). Wanted to see for myself.

3 BSODs in the first hour. 5 in the first day. Seriously. I swear to God.

'Nuff said.

[Mark_Anderson]

Good to ship?

It's a frackin' Beta. What are you, retarded?

[CrashPad63]

Youve got something wrong in the hardware. Mine was the GC had to install generic driver until I read more into it. Then got the original XP driver to work. BSOD come from a bad driver 95% of the time really look into it.

[kpgrelling]

Mr. Anderson: Yes. I am retarded.

CrashPad: Thanks. I'm pretty sure my issue is with the laptop's 350 internal bluetooth card's drivers. Anyway, I know its a Beta, but the online experts were jumping up and down about it, I thought it would require less of my time so that I could test drive the software itself, not continuously wait for restarts. Oh well. (I have skipped Vista and probably would have found these same issues with it and my hardware even though my laptop was "Vista Ready".)

[lbytesxk]

That's because you have no idea what you're doing. Good luck with that.

[heygeo]

I've installed Win 7 32bit on a Lenovo X61 Tablet and on a acer netbook, Win 7 64bit on Lenovo T61p, and my homegrown Intel Bonetrail 2 mainboard based rig with ATI 4870x2... all are flawless so far.
make sure if you have older hardware to update the bios so that its vista ready..

[bruceslog]

Sorry Win7 kept Blu screening your laptop...
I hope you were able to send feedback or post the issue with your laptop's specs to the developers, so they can get it fixed before final.
Your Dell laptop is probably in many homes and businesses out there.
It'd be great if MS got your crash reports and were able to work on it before they start selling Win 7 to all of us. :)

[jessiethe3rd]

Not a SINGLE BSOD here on old and new hardware... On Mac PB Pro on Lenovo T61p on Thinkpad X41... on Toshiba Tablet... etc etc... sorry dude but that's just wierd.

[CrashPad63]

Just to stir this up here. Try this one. This is the "only" beta of this release. There will be only one RC. 7 is solid, feels complete. Ive sent in 3 bugs in the 3 weeks Ive tested mine. 5 year old Dell lappy with a 1.67 processesor 1gb memory, even got the prop Dell media software from 03 to work on it.
Solid and functional.

[obvio-capitao]

Windows7 Beta downloads are off... Linux downloads are on!

I just made this interesting experience: created a virtual machine with just 256 Mb RAM and installed XUbuntu -- a lightweight desktop system.

When I turned on the machine, the operating system would use just 130 Mb of memory. Here's a screenshot:

http://i40.tinypic.com/vfj9k3.png

Then I turned on Firefox, and memory was still below 180Mb.

That's why Linux will dominate the low-end ($200) netbook market: not only because it is free, reducing the software cost by $30-$60, but also because it requires less hardware, reducing the overall cost by other $30-$60.

If you consider software AND hardware, Linux is what will make it possible to sell netbooks for $200, while Windows netbooks will start at $300. (Windows at $200 will be a non-starter.)

If you want to repeat this experiment, try XUbuntu:

http://www.xubuntu.org/

[CrashPad63]

Ah XP has already dispelled this anamoly. Linux for a while was grabbing the marketshare, then a funny thing happened. Consumers did not get it. They could not use Linux out of the box and returned them for the Windows install. No the market has swung to what 80% for Windows and climbing rapidly. And 7 is so ready for netbooks.


http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx

[Radioguy506]

I installed Windows 7 on a Dell Dimension 4500 (Pentium 4, 2GB RAM and 256MB Video Card) and it's runs much better than the beta of Vista did. That said, my system doesn't have enough horsepower to do anything serious with Windows 7 (video or sound editing). Recording in Adobe Audition 3.0 just couldn't keep up. For browsing, surfing and checking e-mail though, it ran fine. It's a 6 year old system, so I didn't have expectations it would be able to do heavy-duty stuff. Still, I'm impressed it installed and ran as well as it did. No blue screens...and that's always a plus. Since it's on a separate hard drive, I'll play with it from time to time to provide some feed back. When I'm in the market for a new PC, I'll want it to have Windows 7.

[The_happy_switcher]

You guys crack me with all your talk about how fast WIN7 is. It's fast, like all new window installs, until the user starts dumping dlls on the hard drive and programs starting bumping up against each other in the registry, on boot up, etc, etc.

[CrashPad63]

Stop the S### talk. You havent used it, you dont know is capabilities. So shutup.

[Seaspray0]

Applerocks, stop being such a crybaby. The mud slinging campaign isn't working. Read what EVERYONE is saying about you and take the hint. The only thing you are making look really really bad is yourself.

[jcomputm]

All this thing about Win 7 is making me crazy! I've planned on downloading the beta for this operating system. But it looks like i needed a DVD for this--It said so online

[Swimatm]

That's true, yes.

[jaycustom]

IDK what is up with all you idiots on here...Win 7 runs awesome on my PC,no probs whatsoever,no BSODs,no need to dl drivers.At least for me.I installed it twice,never had one problem,and YES it is already better and faster than vista. JCOMPUTm..you do not need a dvd.Get a copy of the iso and get Daemon tools(virtual disc) While you are in your XP or Vista,mount the Win 7 iso onto the virtual disc and click "setup" and 25 mins later you're golden.I assume you know to partition your drive) To the rest of ya that say it sux,or you can't DL it anymore..*** have you been??!!Its only been available for 2 months. Try it or ****..and suck me.

[veilx]

DAMN!!... just when i downgraded to xp so i can have dual Operating systems!!.... i still have the Windows7 "windows" folder, what can i do with that?...

PLEASE HELP!!

[jaycustom]

Velix...what do you mean? If you still need help,reply here and I'll help you.