Windows 7 Release Candidate is Now Available for Free Download
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Microsoft has made the Windows 7 Release Candidate available for FREE download and FREE USE FOR 13 MONTHS!
Free is decidedly an UN-Microsoft-like behavior. Microsoft is, no doubt, reacting to new competition it has been facing on the desktop. The Release Candidate will be nearly indistinguishable from the final product, and so should be reasonably safe for installation and use as an everyday OS.
Free downloading of the Win 7 RC is officially permitted beginning today (5 may 2009). To get Windows 7 RC from Microsoft, you will first need to register for a product key. The keys are free, but you do have to register with Microsoft. That means you have to give them information about yourself (name, occupation, current OS you use, etc.) and a valid email. (I gave them a false name, and told them I was a student in Afghanistan!). It also means you will be getting advertising emails from Microsoft for the rest of your life (there's no way to refuse them). Once you have confirmed your email is valid, you will be given a product key and offered a download link. Submit a request for a key here:
hxxp://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx
You can also certainly find Windows 7 RC on many torrent sites (look for "Build 7100"). You'll still need the product key, though, if you want to use it indefinitely.
The Windows 7 RC will run normally with your product key until 1 March 2010. Then, between 1 March 2010 and 1 June 2010, it will limit you to sessions of no more than two hours at a time. Effective 1 June 2010, your Windows 7 RC installation will shut down and refuse to operate until you pay Microsoft a ransom (still no word on what Windwos 7 is going to cost).
Microsoft developers have had access to the RC for over a week now. So, of course it leaked to the torrent sites early, and has actually been available for installation before today. I have been using it for a few days and have some observations.
First, installation was very straightforward and reasonably fast. I didn't actually time it, but I'm guessing it took 20 to 30 minutes on my (new) Athlon dual-core 64-bit build with 8 GB RAM. It runs reasonably fast, and has been stable so far (although I can't say I've logged a great many hours with Win 7 yet). The installer seems to have mis-identified my audio hardware, so I've been forced to use it without sound so far. (I'm trying to figure out how to find and install the correct sound driver so I won't have to live in silence forever). Aside from that, all hardware appears to have been identified correctly and properly configured.
It's been a while since I've used Windows, so I'm having trouble finding everything. It seems to me a clumsy interface, which requires far too many clicks to get things done. But much of that is just my lack of familiarity, and I'm sure I must have felt that way about Linux when I first switched to it. But for now, my impression is that Win 7 lacks the finesse of OS X or Ubuntu 9.04. That said, it's still a perfectly usable desktop interface, and probably feels a bit more like Windows XP than does Vista. User Account Controls is now very Linux-like in how it operates.
As always with Windows, it really shines with automatic installation of software and drivers. I turned on my Epson scanner/printer, and Win 7 recognized it and configured the drivers for me. You won't get that kind of help with Ubuntu! Very impressive!
I couldn't get Google Chrome to run on Windows 7. It installs okay, but won't go anywhere or do anything ("Oh Snap, Something happened!" is all I ever got). Firefox runs better on Win 7 than it does on Ubuntu. I avoided IE8 (except to use to download the others), but I hear it's better than IE has been in the past.
I had forgotten the "joys" of anti-viral software and EULAs and frequent restarting of the computer when new software is installed. That's something I don't miss from my Windows past. I thought for a moment that I'd have to live without free application software, then it occurred to me ("duh!") that most open-source stuff has been ported to Windows. I downloaded OpenOffice 3.0.1 and AVG and a free CD/DVD burner program. Then I downloaded GIMP and that made me feel at home! Everything ran flawlessly. The Windows version of Firefox very much resembles the Linux version. GIMP also looks very much the same on Windows as on Linux. OpenOffice has a cooler look on Windows than Ubuntu, and it seems to run faster (at least, on my system).
A few stupid things annoy me. There should be a demarcation on the taskbar, to separate launch icons from icons of applications that are actually running (they can look the same). Notepad doesn't have tabs to make it easy to work on several documents at once. Some of the "bling" seems a lttle over the top (for example, the constantly-changing wallpapers if a theme is installed struck me as slightly annoying). The desktop gets easily cluttered with the launch icons of installed software (but you'll want to leave them there, as it is slightly cumbersome to launch apps in Windows which do not have desktop icons). Similarly, the "quick launch" menu rapidly becomes cluttered with installed apps (rather limiting its effectiveness as a "quick launch" menu).
Windows 7 remains very territorial. It won't offer a dual-boot at installation (at least, not with Linux - it will try to overwrite your Linux partitions). Even after installation, it kept asking me if it could format over my Linux partitions (!). Microsoft still refuses to support open standards, so Windows can't read my Ubuntu ext3/4 partitions (although Ubuntu has no problem reading everything in the Windows partitions, so it's easy to share things between the two when you're in Ubuntu).
It turns out that the famous "Windows XP Mode" (a Win XP virtual machine inside Windows 7) only operates with certain multi-core processors. Many Intel multi-core processors won't allow you to utilize this feature of Windows 7.
Windows 7 is a perfectly functional desktop OS. I like it. It's surprisingly fast. My complaints are incredible nit-picking, and much of that can probably be fixed with a little work. Except for my lack of sound, I could learn to live with Win 7 if I had to. Of course, I don't have to, so Ubuntu will remain my primary OS, for now. I'll dual boot Win 7 with Ubuntu, until Microsoft requires that I buy it in a year. Then, I'll probably resize my Ubuntu partition to wipe out Win 7. (I'm a cheapskate. I like FREE way too much!)
For most people, Windows 7 will be their OS of choice. This is probably one of the better OSs Microsoft has ever made. And you can hardly agrue with FREE (at least for the next year). Check it out.
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sure is not biased around here!
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My apologies for having opinions.
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it's reasonable to ask for a ransom for a operating system.
some people don't want to spend hours configuring a operating system
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^ I know what you mean, Halfang.
I've spent hours trying to get sound under Windows 7.
But with Ubutnu, everything "just works!"
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not the last time I used it!
but let's keep this thread out of the "my OS is better than yours"
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Microsoft has made the Windows 7 Release Candidate available for FREE download and FREE USE FOR 13 MONTHS!
….The Windows 7 RC will run normally with your product key until 1 March 2010. Then, between 1 March 2010 and 1 June 2010, it will limit you to sessions of no more than two hours at a time. Effective 1 June 2010, your Windows 7 RC installation will shut down and refuse to operate until you pay Microsoft a ransom (still no word on what Windwos 7 is going to cost).
....
Note that this is "free" for one year, but then you must pay Microsoft some undetermined (and probably large) amount of money to continue using the operating system. (Or, if you remember in time, you could re-install your previous operating system.)
This doesn't quite count as "free" in my book. I'll stick with what I have.
PS: It's like the joke that ends: "First prize is a new Microsoft product. Second prize is two of them."
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As I said in my previous thread about W7, it's a whole lot better than Vista. M$ should be forced to give Vista users a free upgrade to W7.
The only thing worse in the RC version {7100} over the previous beta version {7057} I was using, is that I can't seem to keep the refresh rate at 75 hertz. It keeps switching back to 60 hertz. I'm not sure if this is due to the Nvidia beta driver for my graphics card {supplied through W7's update} or something to do with W7 itself.
EDIT: corrected typo for clarity
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my suggestion is to install the official nvidia drivers, rather than using the default.
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Note that this is "free" for one year, but then you must pay Microsoft some undetermined (and probably large) amount of money to continue using the operating system. (Or, if you remember in time, you could re-install your previous operating system.)
This doesn't quite count as "free" in my book. I'll stick with what I have.
I had assumed that Microsoft's marketing plan was to give away use of the Win 7 Release Candidate for a year to get you "addicted" to it. Presumably, users might be more willing to cough up the cost of a Windows license if it saved them the hassle of backing up a year's worth of accumulated data and re-installing the OS and all apps. That doesn't seem to be Microsoft's strategy, however.
Microsoft will NOT allow the Win 7 RC to be upgraded to the final release when it becomes available. You must purchase a fresh copy of Windows 7 final and do a "clean" installation, over-writing your RC installation. So, you're going to have to back up everything and re-install some OS regardless.
Weirdly, however, Microsoft WILL provide an upgrade path for Vista users to "upgrade" to the Windows 7 RC. But that means that your Vista/Win7RC installation will start limiting you to no more than two-hour sessions effective 1 March 2010, and will stop functioning entirely on 1 June 2010. At that point, you'll be forced to do a clean install of something. You could fork over the cash for a copy of Win 7 final and install that. Or, you could dust off your old copy of Vista and re-install that. The latter would still force you to back up everything and re-install Vista and all your data and programs. Also, Windows Genuine Advantage will presumably demand that you phone Microsoft to get their permission to re-install your old Vista license.
Had you not "upgraded" Vista at all, you would have had a much easier time of it.
That's kind of a mess.
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As I said in my previous thread about W7, it's a whole lot better than Vista. M$ should be forced to give Vista users a free upgrade to W7.
The only thing worse in the RC version {7100} over the previous beta version {7057} I was using, is that I can't seem to keep the refresh rate at 75 hertz. It keeps switching back to 60 hertz. I'm not sure if this is due to the Nvidia beta driver for my graphics card {supplied through W7's update} or something to do with W7 itself.
I said above, "As always with Windows, it really shines with automatic installation of software and drivers." I think I may have to eat those worlds.
I've had a few hardware problems with the Win 7 RC. I still haven't been able to get sound, and just yesterday I discovered that Win 7 had failed to recognize a usb hub card plugged into the pci bus. That card powers the ports on the front of my computer, so I can't use flash drives or other usb peripherals unless I plug them into one of two ports on the back of the PC. Win 7 didn't recognize my TV tuner card, either. And it won't work with my bluetooth dongle.
I think they need to do a little work with the hardware drivers, before they release this thing.
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Two things:
1: microsoft released the rc's and betas for previous windows, so nothing new in there.
2: it's still a beta. it might be release candidate, but it's still a beta. -
**Two things:
1: microsoft released the rc's and betas for previous windows, so nothing new in there.
2: it's still a beta. it might be release candidate, but it's still a beta.**I appreciate that.
But the reason for the alphas and betas was precisely to fix stuff like this. And this isn't a "normal" release candidate. Windows 7 is just a tweaking of the Vista codebase - not a truly new version of Windows. So, they've had all of the alphas and betas of Vista, plus the three-year run of Vista, plus all of the alphas and betas of Windows 7 to get this right. What's more, other OSs (including the beta releases of those OSs) have had no trouble whatsoever with this hardwre.
I'm beginning to think they've got big problems at Microsoft.
As Ars Technica says:
To regain its strength, Microsoft has to do two things. First, it cannot let Windows 7 ship without the spit and polish that Windows Vista didn't get. When time hasn't been spent on refining the experience, the rough edges come to annoy customers. Everything put in the OS needs to be ready for prime time, or be left out. That's not a timing issue, but a philosophical one. Related to this, Microsoft must therefore not bite off more than it can chew.
hxxp://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2008/01/windows-7-in-2009-be-careful-what-you-wish-for.ars
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Well, I believe that a company has the right to do what they want.
Windows XP wasn't new either, since it used (heavily) code from NT.
To be honest, my timeline with windows has been 3.11, 95, 98, 2000 (for a brief period, before going back to 98), xp, vista (on a new laptop, only for the time it took me to download windows xp), and now the beta for w7.
And I think that w7 is the best thing that has happened (in windows) since xp. And that's about 7-8 years?
I have used mac os x, and linux (ubuntu, badger something? about 3 years ago). And I still prefer windows over those ones.
And about the price, well, if it exists, it's pirated. If it hasn't been pirated, it's on its way.
And yes, I agree with ArsTechnica that vista was a HUGE mistake and a SHIT operating system. But it had good ideas. And it had terrible implementation (UAC I'm looking at you).
At least, what I've seen so far about w7 has improved those flaws, and added improvements.
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I have used mac os x, and linux (ubuntu, badger something? about 3 years ago). And I still prefer windows over those ones.
I think Breezy Badger may have been back before I was born!
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I have used mac os x, and linux (ubuntu, badger something? about 3 years ago). And I still prefer windows over those ones.
I think Breezy Badger may have been back before I was born!
that one
flaming hell, 5.10, released 2005-10-13I FEEL OLD NOW THANK YOU
