All those who had difficulty downloading Windows 7 beta will get a free 30GB Zune. Those who did get to download Windows 7 then were a tad disappointed that it felt like running Vista, no 30GB Zune for you.

http://xkcd.com/528/

This comes out and my phone line is dead. Damn you, BT!

My essential viewing before even thinking about going to work! This guy has a wicked sense of humour!

to install? fuckin bloatware, they make the code big because HD space isn't the precious commodity it once was, but 16gb is taking the piss...... i got a new laptop, had vista home premium pre-installed, so i can't downgrade, and it's so fuckin slow (and this laptop is no slouch) so i dread to think what win7 will be like :(

Vista is a shambles and I tout XP to anyone who asks for a recommendation. Now though, M$ seem to have got it right with Windows 7 and I'm excited about using it.

Anonymous because I don't feel comfortable congratulating Microsoft :D

Was watching the W7 team blog and the usual retards were out in force saying "blah blah poor way to treat customers". Given a choice of fighting for hours to get constantly kicked off or wait a day and have a key and it downloaded in less than 2 hours the latter was much better.

Painless install, 25 mins from Booting from cd to being on the desktop. Only 1 thing not working but thats because its a proprietary dell card and they didnt create Vista drivers for it. It flies, it really does and thats on a super low spec system.

Thank you MS for not listening to the big box makers, it really does make a difference

Off for a new HD to put it on my gaming rig :D

Tried Win7 on a VPC yesterday.

From what I see it's Vista in Blue, just as slow, and not striking difference. But I am running on an old 3Ghz P4 with only 2Gb of ram.

Need to buy a new machine to try it out on then.

Pretty much what I expected.

Can't download through Firefox 3 :(

One word to solve the bandwidth problem:

bittorrent

When are you on "live at the Apollo"? Just so I don't go that week and end up wasting my money.

So smooth in fact that clicking the "download" button seems to do nothing, at least not in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera or Chrome.

Looks like I'll have to torrent the iso to try it.

2.5 million people, each getting a file over 2 Gb in size - 5 petabytes of Internet traffic. About half a million dollars, if you serve it through Amazon's CloudFront; MS are using Akamai, who are a bit more secretive about pricing. I wonder if this means even Akamai had to beef up infrastructure to deal with this traffic surge across their tens of thousands of servers?

Currently running it. Yes it is faster than Vista but not massively so. A few GUI tweaks seem to have done a job of making it feel quicker.

The UI is just bollox. There's now too many places to launch things from. Stuff like the enhancements in WMP have been virtually hidden away and can only be accessed if you're lucky enough to work out that you need to put it in mini player mode then press the playlist button and then there's an icon for it.

The taskbar is a fucking joke. Either you end up with a load of icons where the only way to tell the difference between a running app and a shortcut is the fact that one of them appears slightly raised, or you alter the option to show text for running apps and end up with a mish-mash of window switching tabs and shortcut icons all mixed up. Even worse is messenger if you use the show text as it no longer puts an icon in the system tray so you have a windows switcher button and if you click on it to show the contact list, you end up with two window switcher buttons for it. As for the system tray, we won't even go there.

People are raving about the power button on the menu. It's the same as Vista except it uses words instead of icons. Wow.

Aero peek. Has there ever been a more pointless thing to put in an OS?

People have commented on how much simpler the Networking Center is. Are they fucking blind? It is the most busy looking window of the lot. As for homegroup, it's broken. If you want to change the password, it'll tell you you need to be in a "Home" location even though the location says you are. So you delete it and go to recreate another only to be told you can't for the same reasons.

Yes I know it's BETA and to expect things but it has been widely bandied around as being feature complete, completely stable and ready for release etc when the truth is that it isn't anywhere near.

Good things? The Library feature is nice if a little confusing at first - stick with it. Err...err...err.....oh yeah, it's quite a stripped out OS - no mail, messenger, movie maker etc. There was something else....ah Device and Printer manager is a nice touch.

In short, it's not worth bothering with yet. Stick with Vista. I've used vlite to create a customised stripped out Vista installation and I swear it feels as quick as Win 7 does once you've got rid of the crap.

Only thing wrong is the honkingly bad Active X download manager. Try it in Firefox - give up quickly.

They could just make he damn download available as a torrent and take the strain off their servers...

I'm waiting for a major car manufacturer to offer public beta release of new model cars. That will be a safe and enjoyable experience I'm sure.

Yeah, well so much for the download.

I can get to the download page, but then...nothing.

Click on download, nothing happens.

What a disappointment!

Well I thought I'd download the beta and give Microsoft another chance, however the site appears to require IE and Windows to download so it would appear only those still members of their cult can see their plans.

I guess their either not confident enough to risk negative views from those who have discovered the alternatives, or they’re still unable to write standards compliant code.

Nothing new to see here… move along…..

I just tried to download the 64-bit version. Nothing happened.

Of course, I _was_ connecting to deepest Mickeysoftville using FireFox from a Mac... I suspect that someone wants to park a little Active-X thingie on punter's systems, and to do it without telling anyone. As that won't work with FF or Macs...

Or maybe it's just me?

Fail.

Requires an ActiveX control to download? Yuck.

Nobody expects Windows 7 to be usable. It's probably one of the last versions of an aincient legacy system.

The emperors new clothes?

Seems to me the servers crashed when some people posted greasemonkeyscripts to keep refreshing the product key page and half the world decided to use it at the same time. DDOS attack!

Paris because she would of known better than them and stuck to Linux

When you get to the page with the download button, view source. You'll see the URI down near the bottom. Paste that into a new tab address bar, and you're off to the races.

Have seen comments that we're all sharing from a pool of five keys for 7/32 and five for 7/64 to the 2.5 million users limit may be a red herring.

If your having problems downloading...

View the page source, and look for the "btnDownload" (on mine it was line 71)... reading across it has an "onclick" attribute, with the URL in there... basically copy from the "http://" to the ".aspx", and load it in your browser.

Oh, and if your wondering... no, I have no idea why they built the page like that (dam retards... they could have used a simple, works anywhere, link... aka "a" tag).

To others above, yes, you can only download in IE. But that's not very surprising.

You can only get your XP updates in IE as well.

What's more of a surprise to me is that - after verifying, switching to IE and verifying again,

i press 'Download now' and get this:

- - -

"Sorry,

The web site you are accessing has been blocked by the requested of The Communication Authority of Thailand."

---

And, in Thai, an obviously (in this case) misplaced comment that the content is illegal, obscene or otherwise inappropriate... :)

Well, I guess they just don't want to give the bandwidth for it.

Did you say 16 GB. ? Then imagine how many surfers here (in the dreamland of pirated software) who wants to download this beta right away. Probably more than the CAT think they can manage on their overseas connections...

But, I kinda like that Microsoft gets blocked for 'inappropriate content' - hehe

Cheers :)

One would have thought MS would like to try and recapture some of the Linux/Mac market share so it is a little odd they would require you to use IE7 + 3rd Party ActiveX control to download the beta.

Windows Defender doesn't like the ActiveX Control

What a joke that you can't use FF to download it. When will these corps realise that BS like that has the opposite effect of what they are trying to achieve.

It might say 16GB, but I'm playing around with it at the moment and it hasn't peaked over 6 yet. As for assuming it will be crap, give it a try before commenting negatively would ya?

View source, grab the link to the ISO, paste into the address bar - it'll load the Akami download manager as a Java applet then.

I am highly amused of comments like "better than Vista".

Tried it out yesterday and besides a few tweaks and a slightly changed desktop, it is absolutely the same.

Hell, even the date of the .DLLs is the same as Vista (June 2006).

Rebranding seems to be the way of getting "new" products out nowadays. Nvidia got away with it, so why should MS not try it also ?! :D

I originally tried downloading it with my Firefox and no dice. Then tried My default IE (64-Bit), it tried to install the active-x component and then just did nothing, so eventually tried in with IE in 32-bit compatability mode and all burst into life.

I'm betting the active -x component just doesn't work with 64-bit. Bit crappy considering everything in currently moving across to 64-bit.....

Well I downloaded it in about 40 minutes and it installed seemlessly. My first impressions are that this is definitely the OS Vista should have been! Everything runs much faster and the UAC is less intrusive. All my Vista drivers work fine to boot.

So far so good, shame I'll have to go back to Vista once the beta expires. MS should do the decent thing and give a free upgrade to everyone (like me) who had Vista forced on them despite asking the PC maker for an alternative!

Meh. The only Windows release I ever liked was XP, because it was the one that came the closest to actually working.

Few mixed messages on here: is 7 just like Longhorn, or is it less shite? Bare in mind if I do install it it's going on a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad with 4gb RAM and two SATA 500gb HDDs.

I have had it installed for a day now. So far it seems a lot quicker than Vista, once you get used to where they have hidden things and turn off that annoying security nag. The only problem I had with it was with a sound driver, and had to search on the internet for one that would work with it. It boots quicker and seems to load programs quicker. This is on an 'old' Pentium 4 3.0Ghz with 2.5gb RAM. I think I quite like it so far, but time will tell!

1) So, follow numerous online instructions which direct you via technet, and hopefully you arrive at the download button.

2) Next, you 'view page source', after you have copied your Activation key/saved the page etc..

3) Find ".iso", and copy the url up to that part (e.g. www.microshizzle/download/latest_junk.iso), and paste it into a new tab, and voila,

4) download manager begins :)

Holy Jobs coz his creations are simple in their beauty; beautifully simple :)

Microsoft expect you to be running Internet Explorer with Active X so that means windows of some sort. Every person who values their sanity knows the two are a recipe for disaster, Internet Explorer is a shit magnet attracting every form of exploit you could possible not want on your computer & windows has a less than perfect reputation for 'security' with its shortcomings exposed in this forum on many occasions.

In the light of competition from Linux & Mac you would think these dorks at Redmond would accept that users may run other operating systems & welcome different browsers to download & try their software.

Sadly, their tiny minds have failed to grasp the reality that competition is challenging their offering & excluding significant groups of users does nothing to win them back, if that is ever possible.

That desktop background... Do they think that's funny?

I downloaded through a newsgroup and then used my proper key... didnt take long at all..

Cant use aero as the machine im testing with is a SFF Dell 2.4ghz HT P4 with 2gb ram - that made a bit of a meal out of vista, so im quite chuffed that everything is smooth :) justabout to send a bug report as preview is broken here... hovering just displays a black box about the height of the task bar...

and I hate the new taskbar.. quicklaunch and apps in any old order... also trying to figure whats running is a bit of a nightmare!

Im surprised that my i-catcher webpage doesnt recognise this as vista, so cant install my CCTV widget..

Aero peek does seem pretty pointless, but not nearly as pointless as some of the window effects.

My pet hate is the "jello wobble" effect that you get in gnome when you open/ move a window. WRT with that? How the hell does it do anything to aid the user in understanding the UI?

But then I guess KDE 4 is pretty close too. All those pixel shows that do nothing useful either. As pointless as the Northern Lights.

Sure, use graphics to **enhance** a UI, but don't use them just to show that the programmers have figured out how to make some cool wobble sequence.

Mac OSX UI has a lot of graphical devices, but these are almost always used in a useful way. The "window poar" when you open/minimise a screen actually does help you remember which dock item it is hiding behind.

Mark Shuttleworth has said that Ubuntu needs to be more like the Mac. That's fine so long as he fully appreciates that Mac OSX UI is designed for understanding and not just to play with pixels. Unfortunately very few people understand the difference and it is far too easy to end up with annoying graphical devices that do nothing useful.

All those who had difficulty downloading Windows 7 beta will get a free 30GB Zune. Those who did get to download Windows 7 will get TWO 30GB Zunes....

If you copy the address as others have said it will use a Java based download tool rather than ActiveX. They buggered up by a.) using a Javascript event and b.) using location.href is not particularly friendly to other browsers.

Otherwise I find 7 a great improvement on XP. It runs just as well as XP did on my 6 year old ThinkPad T40 (Pentium M Banias 1.5GHz and 1GB RAM) -- it'll do for what I need so I can see myself upgrading when it's released. The only downside is that I have to use the standard VGA adapter driver as the XP Radeon driver causes 7 to be somewhat unstable (to be expected)

Personally I think it's a decent release and with Office 2003, Photoshop 7, Live Mesh and some of the Live applications installed, it takes about 10GB of my 160GB hard disk. That I can live with happily enough.

"....we.....took the necessary steps to ensure a good experience,"

In other words, they've deleted it.

"In the light of competition from Linux & Mac you would think these dorks at Redmond would accept that users may run other operating systems & welcome different browsers to download & try their software."

funny , got key etc fine via firefox. Thats the only bit you had to get from MS site, iso is available from other places.

"Tried it out yesterday and besides a few tweaks and a slightly changed desktop, it is absolutely the same."

Hum , greatly reduced mem footprint, the new task bar, new previews etc? Unless big performance increases are "tweaks".

"Requires an ActiveX control to download? Yuck."

Its jsut a download resumer, plenty of people have pointed out that you can jsut view source the page and get the link (if you can't handle view source, you probably shouldn't be playing about with beta software)

"Tried Win7 on a VPC yesterday.

From what I see it's Vista in Blue, just as slow, and not striking difference. But I am running on an old 3Ghz P4 with only 2Gb of ram."

by VPC i assume you mean virtual pc, funny, on my virtual machine i only gave it 512 ram adn other than the slow install and boot (due to the virtual machine) it was nippy.

"fuckin bloatware, they make the code big because HD space isn't the precious commodity it once was, but 16gb is taking the piss"

Didn't take 16 gig on my machine, nowhere near that ammount, how can a around about 2 gig iso expand into 16 gig unless its very very very well compressed, if it was a minimum is cause ms assume you actually want to install applications on it

Now its not perfect it has issues (becuase as people pointed out its BETA, even teh guy above moaning saying that its feature complete and nearly ready for launch said its beta, but not sure where he got nearly ready for launch from, not sure even ms are saying that)

Only issue so far i have is the HD scoring for the experience index (and so possibly hd access, but not noticed it being slow), when it was on a VM (with vista as the host) it got 4.3 , on same machine when i installed properly, gets 2.0. Vista got higher as well, so possibly a dodgy intel chipset driver somewhere.

Other than that great improvement on vista, i actually have some of my 1 gig ram spare!

Lock down your MP3s! There's an issue in the readme, which we know no-one ever reads, unless they're accustomed to testing pre-release (and post-release) software:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/D/B/FDBFC5A5-51CD-4C8D-9F18-7BCC3810498E/Windows%207%20Beta%20Release%20Notes.htm#ID0E6G

"When MP3 files are added (either manually or automatically) to either the Windows Media Player or the Windows Media Center library, or if the file metadata is edited with Windows Explorer, several seconds of audio data may be permanently removed from the start of the file. This issue occurs when files contain thumbnails or other metadata of significant size before importing or editing them."

Now I know this is beta software and all, but it looks like all the folks who're pissed off with Vista are seeing this as a lifeline, not a beta review of an OS. Any sensible beta tester takes precautions before proceding with something like this, but I know I'd be a little ticked off if several seconds of audio were removed from the beginning of any of my tracks (despite the fact they're backed up offsite). There's a fix - but how many people will apply it before letting it see their mp3s? I turned off my NAS media server until the puppy was patched up.

Well. El Reg pins their colours to their arms once more. MS must be hated, must be beaten down, must be undermined at every turn. No matter how good or bad a thing they must do; at Reg towers it is always wrong, Wrong, WRONG!

OpenOffice servers can't take the load? Oh WOW! look how popular OO3.0 is! Gasp! Fawn!

MS servers can't take the load? Look how crap MS are. Yah, boo, sucks.

Raise your game El Reg, and start reporting the news like professionals and not sniggering school children.

Please, watch this and seriously ask yourself if you reckon this company can ever release a decent product if this is where the R+D is going:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTXG2uKNLIw&feature=channel_page

Well spotted!!

As a hater of most things Microsoft, Windows 7 is actually quite good. It runs much better than Vista, and i my feeling is, it runs better than XP too.

I replaced my Vista SP1 x64 install with the W7 x64 beta, and it's a huge improvement, which says how dire Vista is.

The problem will be, how much will Microsoft bone me to upgrade from their clearly broken OS, to a working version.

To me, they need to admit Vista is a turd, cancel work on SP2, and give every person thats wasted years of their life on Vista, a free upgrade to w7.

All Microsoft need to do now, is fix the Xbox, IIS and Internet Explorer, and they might be on the road to regaining former glory...

I'm actually baffled by the huge number of people downloading this.

Are they actually out of games/hobbies/life that they compulsarily need to install a beta OS ?From MS, and based on Vista ? And requiring activeX or a hack in the download page source ?

And that would possibly wipe out some of their files ? And don't tell me the data partition is hidden/not mounted/invisible, since it's totally irrelevant in MS world of "the computer decides what is better for your partitions".

To me, it's a proof that lots of people actually have a PC as a permanent test bed, with 0 data worth backuping.

Yes, it's better than Vista because it's far far far far far less annoying, and it seems to run quite well even in a VM on this sucker, but the new UI is just as horrible as when they did Vista. In their attempt to look "stripped down" and "efficient," they've created a new minimalist look that is just useless. How the hell am I supposed to differentiate between anything *at a glance*?

Haven't played with anything advanced yet - I'm at work, after all - but I'm still of the opinion MS should have made a paid-for upgrade for XP that adds all these features to a code base that already works just fine.

'My pet hate is the "jello wobble" effect that you get in gnome when you open/ move a window.'

That's not a Gnome thing, that's a compiz thing. You can turn it off (and switch other things on; the one I never understood was "paint with fire").

'The "window poar" when you open/minimise a screen actually does help you remember which dock item it is hiding behind.'

Compiz will do that too. I like the 3D desktop rotate as 1) it looks cool and 2) it makes it damned easy to find stuff. I don't really have much switched on beyond that.

I will agree that a lot of the eye-candy is pointless, but most of it will be fall-out from trying to get certain features working and showing what is possible (wobble will exercise the same features as "poar").

As for Win7....they can keep it. After discovering the delights of LinuxMCE,MythTV etc; I see no reason to lumber my systems with the Redmond payload any more. Even the g/f is making mutterings about swapping to Linux. And what started my switch? Vista. And Vista2.0 keeps the switch going.

Have you tried VISTA?

How about you all stop bitching about a BETA release of something, the idea is that you find faults and share them with Microsoft as well as getting a general feel for the new OS.

How the f&*k can you compare it to vista, vista has had 1 service pack and windows 7 is still in BETA?!?!?!?!

I sense you all read the Daily Mail. Always like to complain (even when stuff is free!)

All these comments about Windows 7 being better/worse than Vista after a couple of days testing beats me(someone will now comment that he's been using an alpha version for the last 2 months).

It took me a couple of months to decide that I disliked Vista and yet right at this moment the jury is out but about to return with a unanimous verdict that Windows 7 is (take your pick):

better than Vista and faster

worse than Vista and slower

better than Vista and slower

worse than Vista and faster

better than any fanboi loving, Jobsian piece of Apple garbage

prettier than Ubuntu but not an O/S that would ever be considered for corporates ('you can stick yer iPhone TV Guide/RDP client/Google maps clients, it's not what our users want' sys administrator - oops sorry wrong discussion)

far worse than Microsoft's most stable O/S Windows 2000 (Oh yeah, I got more BSOD from that mutha than any O/S I've ever used)

(and I managed to not mention the pathetic 'retard' term)

I had no problems downloading the 64Bit version, the 32bit version got to 5% then died

installed in on a virtual PC and installed ok and runs ok, I was very disappointed to find the install has taken up 9Gig of hard drive space

M$ what are you doing, no OS should take up that much Space !!!!!!

Cos you would have some long haired wanker telling you "It just works" then a little spining wheel for an hour and then a kernel panic.

Few comments on the install size here. The install requires about 7GB HDD space, anything else is the hibernation file and pagefile. I installed mine to an 8.2GB VMWare image and have a little over 1GB space..

Would have made sense for MS to put this out on torrents (who knows maybe they did?) but after trying the official download which threatened a 13 hour download I had to look elsewhere!

How come that after you've been through the version selection, autentication hoops and all that annoying shit, the last "download" button requires you to install Silverlight? How the heck could something like Silverlight be required for a fracking file download? M$ at its worst. Damn, I was almost tricked into trying some of their shit this time, thank $Deity their deep, deep loserness protected me once again. Thank you for being so retarded, M$ guys, you saved me against temptation.

<QUOTE>the last "download" button requires you to install Silverlight</QUOTE>

Don't be silly Pierre, who says you need to install Silverlight? Hmmm, maybe I remember seeing an ad suggesting Silverlight might be nice somewhere on one of the pages but you never have to install the shiny thing. Perhaps you read that on some weird blog somewhere? The same blogs where most of the commenters seem to get their opinions of Vista from. Reading these comments is like reading a Daily Mail forum discussing immigration, and just as entertaining. Its like watching some kind of social panic in action, like that involving phantom social workers trying to snatch peoples children, or the Halifax Slasher from way back (Look it up - Fortean Times did a fab little booklet about it.) Grab the pitchforks and blazing torches guys, lets go rampage through the big house on the hill. Very Interesting.

I downloaded in around 55 mins to my Mac Pro then ran the install under VMWare, opting to install server 2008 & changed the title, I allocated two processors & 2Gb of ram as Im not going to do anything to ambitious for now, anyway I can always increase as I have plenty spare.

I set off the install & entered my key, then switched back to OS-x to avoid the Microsoft install custard & fired up Unreal Tournament 2004 for quick round of capture the flag whilst the disk thrashed at Redmonds latest bulging install which came to around 7 Gb.

The final setup had some lame install about a home network, or something so I chose network at my workplace as they cant recognise the obvious but still has junk like parental control on control panel, why?. I fired up Internet Explorer and another lot of questions just to start a web browser, yuk, I just downloaded FireFox. IE just sends a shiver down my spine...

To me it looks just like Vista, with more knobs, but its first looks at the new release, Im not sure who said it looked like a Mac, but no it looks like Vista, perhaps the icons may resemble some OSx icon sets, Im not sure & to be honest dont really care. It still looks too Microsoft under 5s only to me.

Anyway, the resource monitor looks quite useful & whilst the information was set out differently it did seem familiar to osx but then you have to expect some convergence in technology even though I suspect a bit of imitation. I had 543 in use 82Mb Modified 581 Standby & 859Mb free which dosnt seem to add up correctly but plenty to run apps and so on, my favourite dos commands were still there, but then most users will never have to use dos, but it can be useful to learn a few commands.

Search is quicker than Vista but then I have a 300Gb Velociraptor & a Mac Pro so one would expect it to be very rapid, it is still not a patch on spotlight for accuracy of whats returned but improved greatly from XP

I suspect that dyed in the wool windows users will love it, but to me its just eye candy, Im no great fan of Microsoft having suffered its comical stunts for many years & chances are if someone asks me how do you do such a thing with Vista, it wont be that much different from Windows 7.

Overall, Im grateful to be able to run it in a virtual box because recovery will be easy when it goes wrong, if it was around £75 Id consider it eventually as an XP replacement but on anything than a powerful computer it may be a different story.

hahaha. Window Steam Blog.

1 - W7 seems to cater for an inverse normal distribution?

(desktop level classifications)

super grokker

grokker

intemediate

naive

dreadfully naive

with emphasis in the OS pleasantly placed on the dreadfully naive and supper grokker alike

2 - tabs

IE(8?) with tabs is stunning. As good as Apple's Spaces on the Mac. However, one app that dos have tabs (Expression Design 1# did not appear to cater for taskbar previews on open tabs within the application #maybe limited to W7 specific apps?)

3- It is a work of art.

The creativity gone intoW7 is stunning. A lot has been learned from the vista Experience or so it would appear

4 - W7 rebound

Perhaps those people or organisations holding back on Vista & hardware might now be sufficiently motivated to make profound commitment? On the other hand there is the credit crunch and I'd guess that these neatly dovetail about W7 and W7 SP1 in timeline terms (or first commercial release of W7 if we are lucky)

5 - boot times

awesomely quick - it makes XP Pro on this machine look decidedly sluggish.

6 - gigantic organisations tend to respond in time anyway

Remember AMD taking a lead on intel?

(4 cores, 4 disks and 10 Gig RAM)

anyone who says the install size is too big has not installed OS X 10.5 which can come out at about 15 GB.

Not sure about the OSX style taskbar, if it indicated what was icons and what was open programs a bit better maybe but I can't see what is wrong with the visa way of doing things.

Someone at Microsoft really does not like the quickstart tool bar , Hide is on XP put it back one Vista and mess in up totally in windows 7

Seems faster though but then I only ever used the 32 bit version of Vista as my canon capt printer was never supported in 64 bit mode which I have installed on windows 7

To all those who are slagging at MS for their BETA release of Windows 7 ... may i state the obvious here that the reason for this PUBLIC BETA release is to get FEEDBACK from the PUBLIC about Windows 7.

If you find something that you dont like ... you can SEND FEEDBACK so they know whats going on (i've submitted a few suggestions thus far).

Its just like voting ... if you don't tell them whats broken, then they don't know what to fix ... and if you don't say something ... and it doesn't get fixed ... then you are a moron for not saying anything.

/thread

After being so impressed on my desktop, of how good W7Beta x64 is over Vista SP1, I also did my laptop with the 32bit flavor, again stunning performance, as good as, if not better than XP, and some nice touches (I like the new taskbar).

I did discover it does not like Kaspersky AV 2009, and causes a blue screen, and it forces you to take a beta of Skype, but that's the only negative things I have found on 2 installs.

Now if only there would be sensible upgrade options for Vista users, and not the usual Microsoft nickel and diming, then I am tempted to ditch Vista totally and put it down to a"me moment".

It take 4 cores, 4 discs and 10gigs of RAM to be performance from Vista2.0? Kee-rist. I am not blowing £2,500+ on a new desktop just to run Redmond's latest ejaculation.

Hello? Ticket office? I'd like the Penguin Express please. One way.

Having read all the negative comments about it I thought I'd give Win7 a try by dual booting it on my laptop (mainly used for testing and repairing other people's machines).

First impressions are it's much like vista with a few changes and a much better taskbar setup, but then I like OSX's dock.

I'm not sure about the under the hood changes but I don't think I'll be forking out for the upgrade from Vista based on the UI changes.

As for performance, I've not really noticed any difference between Vista and Win7 both are acceptable on what isn't the most powerful laptop in the world (T2310, 2gb ram etc).

As to the people who hate it, how about offering MS some feedback on what you don't like rather than spouting fanboi rants?

"Perhaps you read that on some weird blog somewhere?"

I read it on the weird line that appeared at the top of the page when I clicked on the "download" button. As that's the only thing that happened, and as I had exceptionally allowed JS scripts to run I assumed it was the cause of the dysfunction. Now it is entirely possible that the problem lies in a borked script, and the appearance of the "please install Silverlight" line at that precise moment might have been a coincidence, but it doesn't make things any better. Why would I want to install software (let alone an OS) from a company which can't come up with a working download page?

Update: It now shows an empty page with a JS script drawing and erasing a circle of green dots. Endlessely (same 'puter, same settings, so I must assume they changed the site). If it was an attempt to fix their JS, equip flail. (though it does run in FF on a XP box now. Just not on a Linux box. That's too bad as I cannot pipe my downloads to /dev/null in Windows).