You don’t have to wait until next year to try Windows 7 – Microsoft’s successor to Vista is on the Net right now and ready for you to illegally download!
Windows 7 has busted out onto BitTorrent. Less than a week after being distributed to attendees at Microsoft’s annual PDC conference in Los Angeles, the pre-beta Build 6801 has hit the torrent sites and is attracting a flood of downloads.
Sure, it’s an early build – it’s not even a beta, and it’s far from feature-complete. But this ‘milestone’ edition still provides an interesting peek at the next-gen Windows, and it’s surprisingly fast and stable.
Fresh-baked from Redmond, you too can enjoy a sneak peak at the next-gen Windows... The ISO disc image weights in at around 2.75GB or the 32-bit build and 3.3GB for the 64-bit edition, and has to remain as an DVD-resident ISO (or be mounted s a virtual drive through an emulator) in order to install Windows 7 – you can’t unpack it into its component setup files.
Ah, but what about product activation? It turns out that no special keys or codes are needed, at least not on the build that we downloaded and installed (all in the name of story research, you understand). Yes, there’s space for the usual product ID key and you’re prompted to enter that almost immediately upon setup – but we just ignored those fields, clicked the Next button and the installation proceeded as smooth as you please.
It’s a curious step for the company that has most aggressively championed product keys and online activation across almost all of its products since 2000.
But we’re not arguing – we recall the era when a pre-release OS was an ‘eyes only’ issue shrouded by non-disclosure agreements. How times have changed..!
Indeed, it’s almost as if Microsoft expected 7.6801 would be widespread as soon as it landed in the hands of the PDC devotees. And truth to tell, from what we’ve seen to date, Windows 7 isn’t something that Microsoft should hide under a bushel.
The company can only stand to benefit from sharing its post-Vista goodness far and wide. Even at this early stage, 7.6801 is likely to impress many Vista doubters and make them think that Microsoft is on the right track. If that’s indeed the case (and we have a bunch it is), kudos to Vista chief Steven Sinofsky for a clever marketing ploy!
The Windows 7 'wow' starts now, thanks to BitTorrent
We have three pieces of advice for those wishing to sample Windows 7 at this stage. Firstly, as always applies to non-final software, don’t load this on your day-to-day working PC unless you’re willing to go without some features and risk incompatibility issues, crashes and data loss.
Secondly, we suggest you use a torrent hub such as
MiniNova which flags torrents from invitation-only private trackers and also allows users to comment on the quality of torrents. This is a good way to weed out malware-laden fakes.
Thirdly, it's illegal, so if you do it, be aware that you're breaking the law and you could suffer the consequences.