Windows 7: Public Beta Available

January 10, 2009 in Microsoft

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the beta release of Windows 7 (and Windows Server 2008 R2) to the public this week.As of his keynote, the beta has been available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. On Friday January 9th both will be available for download by the general public. 

According to the announcement, Microsoft will be capping the public download to the first 2.5 million, so if you want to try it, you better get it early!

The minimum recommended hardware for the beta call for a 1GHz processor, 1GB of system memory, 16GB of hard disk space and support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128MB of memory (to be able to run the Aero theme).Microsoft hasn’t published an URL yet where you can download the beta, but their own Windows 7 site should be a good starting point (I will update this article with the URL as soon as I get it). 

Update: Microsoft have delayed the Windows 7 Beta download due to overwhelming demand, saying: “Due to very heavy traffic we’re seeing as a result of interest in the Windows 7 Beta, we are adding some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta. We want to ensure customers have the best possible experience when downloading the beta, and we’ll be posting again soon once the beta goes live. Stay tuned! We are excited that you are excited!”

Source : www.helpwithwindows.com

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Tags: 7, Beta, Microsoft, Microsoft, Operating system, Public Beta, seven, vista, windows