Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 29th Jul 2009 22:29 UTC, submitted by JayDee
"Windows 7 Ultimate has been cracked. The pirate milestone, reached almost three months before Windows 7 is set to hit General Availability on October 22, 2009, was achieved via OEM instant offline activation that passes Windows Genuine Advantage validation and keeps the operating system permanently activated. Previous cracks weren't as solid: while they may be working now, they can easily be disabled by Microsoft. This one won't be so easy."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
The checksums are available as a convenience so that customers who download the ISOs legitamately (Technical Beta, TAP, MSDN, TechNet, digital locker etc.) can verify that the downloaded image was not corrupted.
In the past there have been cases where people would have various problems (mostly setup related, sometimes system/app stability) that was often due to a bad burn, or sometimes a corrupted download.
Today, most of the above customers would use the File Transfer Manager (or similar app) which automatically verifies the download, but it's not as if the checksum would not be posted by someone on the Internet if MS did not provide it. It can be generated using a number of tools including one made made by MS.