Windows 7 free for a year!

frostbyte5014

frostbyte5014

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Microsoft will make the release candidate for Windows 7 available for everyone on next Tuesday, May 5th. Microsoft will be giving it away for one year. It will not expire till June 1st 2010. Microsoft says the real version will be available toward the end of this year and could ship as early as October. I think this pretty much means Microsoft is going to finally pony up and give us the OS we have been waiting for. Microsoft seems confident enough that everyone will be willing to pay for it after using it a whole year for free. Keep those fingers crossed! Meanwhile we can play with it for a year to see if we like it.
 
I don't think it is a bad move. I think it is mainly so developers can make sure their applications work perfectly. Also, most people who will be purchasing 7 wont be buying it in a retail box, so they don't care about this download and most home users wont be installing 7 just to have fun.

I don't know about any type of upgrade path, like converting the free 1-year "trial" essentially to a full version. Not really that important because you aren't supposed to be using it as your main desktop anyway. So while some people will complain, they shouldn't have been doing it in the first place.
 
I've been using a Windows 7 beta for three months now, and I must say it's a vast improvement over Vista in terms of performance and usability.

A year's free licence should encourage a lot more users to experiment with upgrade from XP. It's a far more positive move than the foisting that was attempted with Vista.
 
most boot disks can be put on usb by just following guides online, and he could always use an ide to usb adapter with a internal dvd rom.

Abe
 
Windows 7 is great :D I'm using it right now and all my hardware is compatible however i would recommend you do a clean install since the upgrade option takes alot longer to install and i got BSOD for some reason.

Shut down and start up times is around 11 seconds from pressing the power button to loading my desktop i'm blown away! :D

the only thing i had to do was to find a beta driver for my sound card but that was no problem with creative. :) Overall its a postive experience.
 
My download finished at about 3:00am (GMT -6). Here are the verified hashes:

MD5
8867c13330f56a93944bcd46dcd73590

SHA1 (per Microsoft)
7D1F486CA569EFFFFB719CFB48355BB7BF499712

EDIT: Above is for x86, below is for x64.

SHA1 (per Microsoft)
FC867FE1AB2E0A9796F9E4D155B44EA6998F4874
 
Last edited:
It seemes like sending feedback to M$ helps they fixes one of the things i sent feedback about
picture.php
picture.php
 
arrow_runner said:
Is anyone dual booting? If so, how is it working? Anyone doing it w/ Linux?

I'd actually like to quad boot on my laptop, XP,Vista,7, Ubuntu...
Click to expand...
I'm dual booting with Vista without problems. When I was using the beta, it wouldn't show my Vista volume. I didn't do any research into why. Now with RC1 it does show the Vista volume.

When I installed, everything was recognized. I didn't have to install any drivers at all.
 
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