Windows 7 public beta released

[voodooflux]

I think the reason MS won't distribute something like this via BitTorrent (or similar) is simply security - it's way too easy for somebody to start seeding an apparently-legitimate download full of trojans, keyloggers, spambots, etc.

I think a download initiated directly via their site, via private tracker or equivalent to their P2P technology of choice, would be considered to be safe (or as safe as any other download from MS anyway )

However, I would imagine that as traffic passes through various intermediate client nodes there may be a potential vulnerability whereby the payload could be tampered with - I don't know the BitTorrent protocol well enough to determine whether this is possible (I would hope not).

On this subject, there may be a substantial risk of dodgy torrents for this particular (and probably popular) beta at the moment, given that the official download was suspended for a period, possibly leading to prospective evaluators grabbing it from wherever they can.

[scooby]

for some reason, (and i'm not sure how!) i ended up on a MS page that gave me serial numbers. I've a spare serial for both of the 32 and 64bit...

EDIT: i believe i log in to my live account and used this link (i dont Technet or anything else...)

32bit: https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperi...s/default.aspx
64bit: https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperi...s/default.aspx

They give me a different serial each time... i dont even think its required, so am not sure.

Again, should anyone want one and you dont have a live account, let me know.

[voodooflux]

According to El Reg...

Microsoft said earlier this week that it would limit the public beta to 2.5 million users, but it has now decided to offer unlimited downloads for the next fortnight.

[darmstadt]

Well installed nice and quick on MS Virtual PC under Vista 64 but blew out when I tried to install the Virtual PC add-ons. Its now running pretty well under Sun's xVM VirtualBox, still to try under VMWare though.

[RSoles]

Just in case anyone's wondering......

The download manager executable downloads an ISO image.
Only seems to work for IE, not Firefox.
You then burn the DVD.
Install from the DVD.

BUT the DVD isn't bootable so you need windoze to install windoze.
AND you can't make the DVD bootable because one of the files is >2GB.

Hey hum, AND it doesn't like my Radeon 9600 (gash system from attic).

Looks very like vista..........Like the programmer's calculator though....

[voodooflux]

BUT the DVD isn't bootable so you need windoze to install windoze.

Oh yes it is.

AND you can't make the DVD bootable because one of the files is >2GB.

Wha...? DVD's have a capacity of 4.7GB per layer - both the 32-bit and 64-bit ISO files for Windows 7 are well below this.

[HeliCraig]

I'm going to try it as a virtual machine and see how that goes.

Anybody installed it in VMWare yet?
Anybody installed it in VMWare Fusion on a Mac yet?

[TheFaQQer]

Just in case anyone's wondering......

The download manager executable downloads an ISO image.
Only seems to work for IE, not Firefox.
You then burn the DVD.
Install from the DVD.

BUT the DVD isn't bootable so you need windoze to install windoze.
AND you can't make the DVD bootable because one of the files is >2GB.

Hey hum, AND it doesn't like my Radeon 9600 (gash system from attic).

Looks very like vista..........Like the programmer's calculator though....

Worked fine for my from Firefox, and burnt a bootable DVD.

[TheFaQQer]

Anybody installed it in VMWare yet?
Anybody installed it in VMWare Fusion on a Mac yet?

Installed it on VMWare last night with no problems (apart from me upgrading my version of VMware server and then not being able to find my old machines).

Seems to work OK, if a little slow (but no more so than any other VMware image). I have no idea why I bothered, to be honest, but it's there if I want to play around with it.

Installed from scratch, so you don't need to do it as an upgrade to anything.

[RSoles]

How odd.
My Seven disk definitely doesn't boot.
The attic pc had linux installed on it so I had to install XP (that disk booted fine)
Then Seven would auto-run (as opposed to boot) and install.


I had tried to use Nero to convert the Seven disk to a bootable DVD, but it complained about a >2Gfile being incompatible with the ISO standard for bootable DVDs.

RS