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windows 7 beta available for free Jan 9 (!)

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Darwin:
The blog page has now removed all reference to 'come back this afternoon'
-Carol Haynes (January 09, 2009, 06:29 PM)
--- End quote ---

Damn! That means that I've been loading a cached copy for the past hour  :o

Darwin:
UPDATE - I just checked and Carol is correct. This note is now featured underneath the blurb about having listened to the userbase:

Thanks for your interest in the Windows 7 Beta. The volume has been phenomenal—we're in the process of adding more servers to handle the demand. We're sorry for the delay and we'll re-post the Beta as soon as we can ensure a quality download experience.
--- End quote ---

f0dder:
Microsoft would have to release some kind of small "ISO checker" program that people could download to verify that the torrent is complete/legitimate after it's finished downloading.-Hirudin (January 09, 2009, 06:17 PM)
--- End quote ---
Simple MD5 or SHA1 would be enough.
-fenixproductions (January 09, 2009, 06:48 PM)
--- End quote ---
And completely unnecessary - you'd get the .torrent file from Microsoft, guaranteeing authenticity, and BitTorrent does it's own hashing.

Anyway, I decided to grab the 32-bit Win7 beta from *cough* alternate sources *cough* (don't really see a problem in doing so), and have tried it under vmware 5.5.9 (64bit host). Gave it a single gigabyte of memory (I have 8, but decided to stress Win7 a bit :)), and it seems pretty nice.

Initial impressions:

* Install time still takes a while, and still requires multiple reboots. Not a big issue since you aren't going to do this often, but I still feel MS could do better.
* The video driver from VMWare tools messes up the system - but even without that driver, the GUI (although quite sloppy) still seems snappier than XP without a proper video driver. Might be different on real hardware.
* UAC now has 4 levels - from Vista-style to completely off. Default is level 3, which is like Vista except that control panel and such doesn't have elevation prompts. If this is implemented without being a glaring security hole, it's a really nice thing.
* System seems very responsive, and relatively low memory usage. Around 300meg used after boot without additional apps installed.
* The new taskbar is interesting. I think I could grow to like it... basically, quicklaunch is removed but you can "pin" shorcuts to the taskbar. Those shortcuts will work both for starting apps, but also group running apps. Seems like it might need application support to do the "all in one" thing, though - firefox works perfectly, xplorer2 ends up having the "launch icon" and an icon for the running processes.
* Startup seems relatively fast.
* Control panel still has a zillion clicks like Vista, but at least you can directly right-click your desktop and choose "change resolution" now :)
* Moving a window to the far right or left side of the screen maximizes it to half the screen resolution, this seems very useful for widescreen monitors. Moving to top of screen maximizes fully. Dragging and shaking a window minimizes all background windows.
I feel inclined to finding a spare harddrive and giving the beta a go on real hardware, load it with programs etc... I'd like to see how much advantage Superfetch brings compared to XP's old prefetch.

cmpm:
from
'Download Squad' feed
received at 5:20pm EST/USA

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/01/09/direct-download-links-for-windows-7-beta-iso-surface/

so far it works for downloading
it will take a while depending on your connection.....

i would have posted this sooner
but i was at my workplace
without access to my feeds

f0dder:
cmpm: probably works, thing is you don't get a beta key - so you're left with a 30day trial (or 120 days if you use the rearm trick, probably). I got my ISO at 2MB/s, didn't take long :D

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