Windows 7 beta available worldwide by weekend, says Microsoft

What happens when the Beta expires?

Will 7 roll me back to Vista or will my machine lock up and force me re-install Vista?

If I have to re-install then I dont think it's worth it.

Maybe I can dig up a beater box and mess around with that.

Originally posted by Agit8dChop
.... but windows 7 in my mind will be another windows millenium.

Sorry there but it is the NEW windows millenium. Compatibility issues with previous version, problems with transfering files in the file format.... just to name a few issues. The thing is like an old chevelle with no floor and no clutch. Just looks good sitting there.....

Just my opinion of course. But the same opinion certain companys have had as well... Clients are being offered Downgrades. Not UPGRADES but we are talking about... down... grade... So there you have it..

Originally posted by KpxMarMoTT

Originally posted by Agit8dChop
.... but windows 7 in my mind will be another windows millenium.

Sorry there but it is the NEW windows millenium. Compatibility issues with previous version, problems with transfering files in the file format.... just to name a few issues. The thing is like an old chevelle with no floor and no clutch. Just looks good sitting there.....

Just my opinion of course. But the same opinion certain companys have had as well... Clients are being offered Downgrades. Not UPGRADES but we are talking about... down... grade... So there you have it..

Actually it is Vista that is the new ME. Windows 7 will be like XP, around for years.

Yes and look at the conditions to get it.
You can only upgrade to it from Vista.
So this is ensuring if people want to participate in the hype, they have to BUY Vista the piece of junk.
Of course some of us didn't pay for vista wink wink, but of course this is what it implies from them.
And it expires in August 2009 so you are going to have to buy it eventually anyway.
Why would anyone even bother when its just another piece of junk, riddled with advertising marketing and spying on you tools.
I say they can keep it.

[edit on 9-1-2009 by BorgHoffen]

reply to post by Niall197


You know, for the average user, Vista works just fine. As does Windows XP, Windows 2000, Winows 98 and Windows 3.1.1. All we (average) users care about is that the programs we normally run, run well. In Vista I can surf the net, do e-mail, use spreadhseets, powerpoints, drafting sufware, etc. What do I care if the RTFM module does not play well with the framistan dll?

reply to post by BorgHoffen


Nope, in case you missed my previous post, you can do a clean install of windows 7 (which means without vista, on an empty formatted partition...in case you didn't know what a clean install is).

Of course it expires in August, it is a BETA it is so it can be tested and bugs can be reported so the general public has a good, reliable OS by the time it rolls out.

Originally posted by BorgHoffen
Yes and look at the conditions to get it.
You can only upgrade to it from Vista.
So this is ensuring if people want to participate in the hype, they have to BUY Vista the piece of junk.
Of course some of us didn't pay for vista wink wink, but of course this is what it implies from them.
And it expires in August 2009 so you are going to have to buy it eventually anyway.
Why would anyone even bother when its just another piece of junk, riddled with advertising marketing and spying on you tools.
I say they can keep it.

[edit on 9-1-2009 by BorgHoffen]

I would like to see any kind of proof that you have about the last part of your statement. If you don't like Windows fine, but tthere is no need to outright lie about it.

No one is forcing you to try this or even buy it when it it comes out. I bet you don't even know why you need to have Vista to try it out do you?

If you don't know what you are talking about and just want to gripe, keep it to yourself.

Well yeah to make myself clear :

Windows Vista = Windows Millenium = Bucket of bolts

Just so were all on that same page. Does anyone have the minimum system requirements just so we all know we shouldn't be hyping to get it on a p3 or p4 with 512 megs o ram

Originally posted by BorgHoffen
And it expires in August 2009 so you are going to have to buy it eventually anyway.

You can always roll back the clock to stop it from expiring lol

I think I'll wait for Win 7.11

reply to post by KpxMarMoTT


Sorry I though your were saying W7 would be the new ME. W7 has lower minimum specs than Vista. I will try to find them online today.

One step ahead of you:

* Processor: 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor
* Memory: 1 GB of system memory
* Hard drive: 16 GB of available disk space (really only needs about 6 GB of space)
* Video card: Support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128MB memory (in order to enable Aero theme)
* Drive: DVD-R/W drive (to burn the iso image of the beta)
* Internet connection (to download the Beta and get updates)

and for those who care:
Windows 7 Beta Available For Download NOW!

All you need to do is sign in with your windows live ID. First 2.5 million people get it. Servers are a little bogged down. Good Luck

reply to post by thisguyrighthere


There is a timer reset google it (sorry if im breaking any rules posting that)

And Vista was the new Monumental Error (ME) Microsoft are encouraging people to stick with XP until they get 7 out, they have even extended XP's shelf life.

I'm bad for O/S's, my laptop is running ubuntu, but my main system has:

Ubuntu x64
XP x64
Vista x64
Windows 7
Mac OS X

Now thats what you call silly, the only reason I aint got 98 on there is because it doesn't support the hardware, lol.

I have had xp linux and osx on my macbook lol. You can run wow in linux no problem so if you are using up space just for that you don't need to. I play eve online and I xouldnt get it to run on linux, its not capable to run on osx if you use intel graphics chip, but it runs under xp on the macbook. Go figure


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Posted Via ATSmobile (BETA v0.3)


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Before anyone starts complaining about Microsoft failing to deliver. The download is not available yet. It goes live at 12pm PST. Multiple blogging sites are pointing to the page, but it's not ready. If you want real confirmation, go to the windows 7 site. www.microsoft.com...

Hey All,
The tag line for this site "deny ignorance", is really not meant to be "deny being ignorant". Sorry, I just had to say that.

The amount of complete misunderstanding on this thread is almost monumental. And for the most part the whole concept that Microsoft or other large software vendor is providing these operating systems for your daily use is not correct. These behemoth operating systems are designed to sell hardware.

You need the fastest cpu's with the most ram running state of the art video cards with massive gpu's to run....notepad?

The day to day use of your computer, could easily be handled by any old Pentium 100, with 128 mb of ram and an 8mb s3 video card. It is only when you start entering the realms of Photoshop, multimedia development and some accounting applications that these beastly computers have any real merit.

I have no doubt that some people on this thread has had a very positive experience with vista. I also have no doubt that others have had a similar experience with xp, 2k and some even had a positive experience with Millennium Edition, even though all of these editions have blue screened and lost data on many installs. "Windows firewall" is an oxymoron, as windows security is non existent.

Our individual personal experiences taint our perception of a product and this is the heart of Microsoft's survivability model. As long as there is a sporadic level of acceptance with their products, they will continue to provide half answers and broken promises and we will continue to eat it up like the good sheeple we are.

I dare anyone of us to put our cars through the same trials of level of accepted failure. If your car crapped out for no reason, only to leave you stranded and upon your return to "restart it" functioned correctly, it would soon be destined for the sales yard. If you were forced to "re-buy" your car every 2 years or purchase "upgrades" to make it function the way it was sold to you, you would again, run screaming from that model. Even if the upgrades were free, the lack of use would be enough to help you make a change.

Windows 7 will change little with your day to day computing. If you are already having issues with xp or vista you will also have issues with windows 7.

For many, Linux is fast becoming a decent alternative for day to day use. It is secure, fast and free. Ubuntu is an easier install that many early versions of windows and "out of the box", will provide the average user with the worry free day to day they think they are buying with windows. If Ubuntu were available the way it is today back in the windows 98 days, I believe we would see a lot fewer zombies on the net.

Mac's do not run on Linux. they use the Darwin projects version of FreeBSD. This is a variant of UNIX, which is also extremely secure, robust and efficient. (just clearing that up)

I like to compare windows firewall or any software firewall product as a "paper condom". Sure it looks like it will do the job, but don't put it to the test.

The bottom line here is that we have all been lied to about the operating systems we have been buying. Todays "next best thing" is basically the same as yesterdays "old thing". Sure it might crash less, or crash differently, but its certainly doing its real job, and that is to sell hardware. After all it's fun to boast about how BIG our hard drives are, or how sleek our ram is. As long as we keep buying, they win.

Thanks for reading.
..Ex

reply to post by v3_exceed


Hey V3, i'm sorry to contradict you, i agree with everything you are saying except for one thing, mac isn't stuck with Darwin............I have an eMac (G4@1Ghz) which is running yellow dog linux, there are several flavours of *nix out for ppc systems.

Back on to the subject of Windows 7, since reading this thread I have been playing about with it (i'm typing this from it now), and I really cannot see any difference over Vista, it is faster, but then its a beta with less memory hogging stuff, only DX11 WMP12 IE8 etc etc, oh an the sidebar hasn't got the big grey transparent bar going from top to bottom. As far as the speeds concerned, I remember when Vista // Longhorn was in beta stage, started off faster than XP, after a month practically ground to a halt. I have been running Windows 7 for just over a month now and still running smooth, Crysis and GTA IV run fantastic, as does MS Office 2007, PS CS2, and others. I have had no driver issues either.

reply to post by v3_exceed


Haha, for many, Linux is fast becoming a decent alternative for day to day use since what, 1995? I'm hearing about Linux since the day I was happy with my Windows 95. And "oooh, Linux is gonna kill windows before the end of teh millennium", but still its market share hasn't increased over 1%.

Operating systems developed to sell new hardware? Yeah, but it depends on how you view it. Modern systems like Vista/7 or MacOSX are developped for modern computers. Sure, a Pentium 100 with 16MB of RAM can be a good performing machine for some tasks even today, but with Windows 95 (or a similar, low end OS) installed. You don't expect people to have Windows 95 on their quad core CPUs and gigabytes of RAM, do you?
Nobody is asking you to install Vista on a 486. Windows XP is not performing any better on modern PCs and the more powerful the hardware is, the faster Vista becomes, and XP is just old and slow.

The current Windows 7 beta is probably the best thing I've seen happen to Windows since 95. I never liked WinXP, because it was extremely slow and hardware demanding back in 2001. Hell, it's still slow as hell - launching, right after boot, OpenOffice takes up to 15 seconds. On Vista... ~3 seconds.

I'm not saying everyone should quickly move to the next newest thing - it's good to wait. Today, Vista is not as bad as it seemed to be when it was released. Most people who critisize Vista either had it on an incapable computer or never used it at all. A tiny percentage of such people actualy used it and found something wrong.

edit: Windows 7 looks like Vista? Maybe a little bit, the windows still have glass on them, but I don't think the taskbar ever look like this before:

[edit on 9/1/2009 by relu84]

People getting all excited about Win7 dont know how to configure Ubuntu. That system blows Windows out of the water big time. The feeling I got when I had the 3D window effects just the way I wanted them was a big WOW.... they are way ahead of Win7.

Its too bad they dont ship Ubuntu with the best icon packs and themes so it really looks great from the start, because that would get the attention of a lot of young people who think the default look is the way it looks... Ubuntu default install is really ugly, Win7 default install is not. But once configured, Ubuntu looks better than Win7.


[edit on 9-1-2009 by Copernicus]

That got me thinking.

I haven't seen any benchmarks comparing Windows, Linux and Mac OSX in the same tasks, for example, encoding video with x264 (which is available for all three platforms), speed of copying files, compressing and decompressing with zip, the speed of text replacement in default text editor, speed at which the systems boot, how fast is OpenOffice starting up after booting... and stuff like that.

If I'm bored, I'm going to do something like this comparing Windows Vista and 7 with Linux (Ubuntu is probably the most popular distro right now, I think).

reply to post by Copernicus


Now, the reason people use Windows is a) everyone know it and b) everyone knows how to use it, I was sat just before with Ubuntu Intrepid, ok, the repositorys have pretty much everything everyone wants, and its not to difficult to learn how to do it, but I cant see most people wanting something not in the repos and downloading the source, giving it, ./configure : make : make install, its just to long and baffling for most. Now I like Linux, I have been using it since roughly 1995/6, Ubuntu has to be one of the most user friendly distros, but it is not as convenient or as easy to learn as Windows, sad, but true.