Here’s a surprising bit of news from Microsoft head-honcho Steve Ballmer: Starting tomorrow (Friday, Jan. 9), you can download the Windows 7 public beta free of charge. An excerpt of the report from Wired:
Unveiled by an intense Ballmer during his keynote address on the eve of CES 2009, Windows 7 will offer better performance on underpowered machines such as netbooks, support for multitouch interfaces, and simplified home networking.
Ballmer said that this would be the “best version of Windows ever” and pointed out features that implicitly acknowledged the problems with Windows Vista.
What I find most interesting about this is that Windows 7 is supposedly a full year away from release. Is it possible the highly anticipated OS will ship sooner than planned? After all, the Vista public beta preceded the official launch by only about six months.
In any case, expect serious traffic delays when you go to download the OS. Microsoft says it’ll cap downloads at 2.5 million, which makes me wonder if/when they’ll hit that mark. Any predictions?
In the meantime, unless you have a spare machine you can use to install the beta, consider a virtual-machine setup. Here’s everything you need to know about running Windows 7 on Microsoft’s Virtual PC software.
