Time is running out to download Windows 7 Beta
Posted
Wednesday, January 14, 2009 2:05 PM
by
Nathan Zaugg
There have been a lot of buzz around Windows 7 lately. Most people plan to migrate from XP straight to Windows 7, skipping Vista altogether! Personally I have really liked Vista. The only real issue I had is it wouldn't run a really old game that I used to play on Windows XP. Considering the game was developed for Windows 98 I am pretty impressed it ran on XP! I also really like the idea that most of my programs are not running with Administrator permissions. I also must admit that I purchased hardware specifically geared toward Vista compatibility. I also switched to 64 bit because 3GB of RAM just isn't enough for me, but that would have been independent of XP or Vista.
I've installed a copy of Windows 7 64-bit on a virtual machine. To me it looks and feels just like Vista. I was impressed that the memory foot-print was much smaller but a recent fresh install of Vista wasn't too much larger. It also featured an improved installer and some new features. If someone can tell me why it wants to make a 100MB partition and what that is used for please leave a comment here.
Microsoft has decided that it's better to have more eyes on something than less so they have made Windows 7 Beta 1 an open invitation. The caveat is that the download link is only valid until (or so I am told) the 24th of Jan 09. So if you think you may want to tinker you better get downloading! Especially since the download servers have been saturated since the beta was made public.
Download Windows 7 Beta 1