TechNet Plus Subscribers - Download Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 BETA Now!!!

Windows 7 beta 1 announced during CES keynote - includes links

Jose Barreto's Blog — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:24:21 GMT

Steve Ballmer announced during his CES keynote the immediate availability of the Windows 7 beta to TechNet

re: TechNet Plus Subscribers - Download Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 BETA Now!!!

Steve Syfuhs — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 07:48:07 GMT

Daniel: I had similar issues, it seemed to the be transfer manager app. It seemed to work when I restarted the app.

re: TechNet Plus Subscribers - Download Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 BETA Now!!!

Daniel Viau — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 04:04:39 GMT

No deal - I can't download any of the packages from technet. File Transfer Manager says my validation succeeded but nothing gets downloaded. I tried other packages without success - there must be something wrong with the downloads because it worked fine at Christmas..

I'll try again later - good luck guys!

Daniel

re: TechNet Plus Subscribers - Download Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 BETA Now!!!

Steve Syfuhs — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:02:15 GMT

Yeah, good idea. Now all I have to do is find the log. :)

re: TechNet Plus Subscribers - Download Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 BETA Now!!!

Sean Kearney — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:56:00 GMT

The activation keys are currently unavailable. Please install without using keys and check back in a few days to claim the keys. Sorry for the inconvenience.

So you might not get your key today but you can STILL install :)

WOOOOHOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

re: TechNet Plus Subscribers - Download Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 BETA Now!!!

DamirB — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:22:26 GMT

Thanks for the feedback and testing. Might be worthwhile sending along the install log to see what it got hung up on.

re: TechNet Plus Subscribers - Download Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 BETA Now!!!

Steve Syfuhs — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:04:30 GMT

The install was painless on my desktop. Took a little longer than Rick's did. But then it also took forever to format the HD. Not so on the laptop. Broke down around 78% everytime. No useful errors either.

So to fix, I booted into WinPE, ran some ImageX commands on the .wim file, extracted to the HD, booted into recovery mode, told it to recover my computer, rebooted and went into the final stages of install. Turned out to be a bad driver somewhere down the line. I call it the XP-Win7 Halfling process. :)

re: TechNet Plus Subscribers - Download Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 BETA Now!!!

Rick Claus — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:53:03 GMT

In case you were wondering... Barnaby Jeans (@bjeans) beat us both due to a bad engineering sample Dell E4300 I started on and Mark Relphs bad DVD burn.

On my production Dell E4300 - it took a short 16 minutes from start to finish. Once the network was connected, it auto setup a HomeGroup and connected to the internet for driver updates. To Windows 7 credit (and to Dell's) all drivers except 2 (wireless smartcard reader and a fingerprint reader) were baked in and working.

Performance score - 3.9. three tenths of a point higher then vista install on same machine - go figure.

More Later...

Rick