Windows 7 Beta 1 Released - For Free
So last Friday was supposed to be the official launch of the semi-public beta of Windows 7, with Microsoft promising 2.5 million unique product keys to people.
This set into motion a massive surge on Microsoft’s servers on Friday, culminating in an epic crash. I myself wasted 4 hours trying to get a key (of course, I had my computer do it for me so I could be productive during that time) and when I woke up on Saturday I found that Microsoft had made it a public beta, and were offering five universal keys for each version.
In that case, I believe I can do this:
(Links to Disc Images are supposed to work until January 24th)
Windows 7 Beta 1 32-bit Version
Keys:
- QXV7B-K78W2-QGPR6-9FWH9-KGMM7
- 6JKV2-QPB8H-RQ893-FW7TM-PBJ73
- GG4MQ-MGK72-HVXFW-KHCRF-KW6KY
- 4HJRK-X6Q28-HWRFY-WDYHJ-K8HDH
- TQ32R-WFBDM-GFHD2-QGVMH-3P9GC
Windows 7 Beta 1 64-bit Version
Keys:
- RFFTV-J6K7W-MHBQJ-XYMMJ-Q8DCH
- 482XP-6J9WR-4JXT3-VBPP6-FQF4M
- 7XRCQ-RPY28-YY9P8-R6HD8-84GH3
- D9RHV-JG8XC-C77H2-3YF6D-RYRJ9
- JYDV8-H8VXG-74RPT-6BJPB-X42V4
I have installed it to a VirtualBox Virtual Machine, and have done some playing around in it.
In my opinion there is nothing particularly exciting about it, it’s everything Vista should have been but was not.
New stuff I can name off the top of my head are:
- New taskbar, that I think is too big. It can easily be shrunk to normal size.
- Ribbon interface to a bunch of stuff, like MSPaint and Wordpad.
- New (very good) interface for Calculator.
- Only takes up half the hard drive space of a Vista install.
As it is now, Windows 7 Beta is seriously screwing up my download rates... like... 25 kb/s. It also refuses to share properly...
Downloading and will test on virtual machine. I'm reserving 4 gb ram for it lol.
Wow, it really looks like an upgraded version of vista..... the gui looks better and how do you change the taskbar size?
oh and omg the memory usage is so low compared to vista....
and nvm found how to shrink taskbar
Wait ... are the five keys for different versions of windows 7?
Why Microsoft Why?????
Ok, so because Microsoft is terrible like that, let me explain.
There are 5 keys for Windows 7 32-bit, and 5 keys for Windows 7 64-bit.
The beta is only in one "edition", Ultimate, but apparently the retail is going to be like Vista, with tons of editions.