As promised, Microsoft has released the beta to Windows 7 to the general public a few hours ago. Don’t get your hopes up yet, though, as Microsoft’s servers are completely hammered right now – which isn’t too hard to imagine, seeing the 2.5 million download limit Microsoft imposed. This probably led to everyone rushing to Microsoft’s servers to get their hands on the beta, clogging the servers (2.5m times a 3GB image file, do the math). You will have to be patient, and hope for the best if you want the beta and its product key. The beta will expire August 1st, 2009.
What did Microsoft expect to happen? Of course the servers are being hammered. Once MicrosoftFT announced they would cap the activation codes at 2.5M, it created this feeding frenzy so that only those who have nothing to do all day but hit their browser “refresh” button constantly will be able to get at it.
This has been nothing but a big publicity campaign. Everyone knows that this is no way to distribute software to IT professionals for the purpose of testing. It’s like throwing money into a crowd from the back of a moving truck. “What’s the matter? Didn’t you get yours?” Of course not. This is ridiculous. There are many other ways that Microsoft could have chosen to distribute this in an orderly manner. They chose this way because they knew it would create the most attention and make the news.
Okay, so Microsoft will be getting a lot of publicity for this. And whether they expected it or not, their servers got hammered. They get publicity, and 2.5 million people get a Windows 7 Beta copy. Why exactly are you complaining?
Edited 2009-01-09 21:30 UTC
> those who have nothing to do all day but hit their browser “refresh” button constantly will be able to get at it.
Damn, you right! I’m at work and I’m refreshing the browser window every five minutes to see if the beta is out for download.
I do have to wonder what the point of the download cap is anyway, as I think you’re exactly right. That creates a rush, and for no apparent purpose. It sort of reminds me of the Windows XP EOL situation, they keep extending it, little by little. I wouldn’t put it past them to do the same with this download limit.
Maybe to create hype and attention at the phenomenal volume?
“What? Huh? Microsoft’s servers couldn’t handle the demand?! It MUST be good!”
The linked page says “Windows 7 Beta coming soon!”…
Also, the windowsteamblog just posted: “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 I’ll be posting here again soon once the beta goes live. Stay tuned! We are excited that you are excited!”
(17 mins ago)
Windows 7 x86 (32bit): http://tinyurl.com/8om8uk
Windows 7 x64 (64bit): http://tinyurl.com/8kjak3
Microsoft is also providing a QFE patch for the MP3 corruption issues that have plagued build 7000 [ http://tinyurl.com/a85ks9 ]. It’s extremely important you apply this patch as you may lose parts of your MP3s if the patch is not applied.
32bit patch http://tinyurl.com/7dw3ru
64bit patch http://tinyurl.com/7vsw59
[all browsers are fine, except chrome: “Error 8 (net::ERR_FILE_TOO_BIG): Unknown error.” lol
]
Edited 2009-01-09 23:43 UTC
So there servers are busted. I wonder which version of Windows was supposed to handle this load? Whichever it was, it wasn’t a good advert for its OS – and it wasn’t going to be some Unix was it?
Remember when they first took over hotmail and had to abandon their attempt to host it on Windows and use FreeBSD.
Ribbing aside, here is an interesting technical read about their transition from FreeBSD to Windows, evaluating pros and cons:
http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html
The section on strengths and weakness of the OSes is interesting.
They should have used Bittorrent…it would have gone much better for Microsoft…learn from Linux distro Microsoft!
It is good merketing move and this is what Linux distrod must learn from MS. Do you really think MS could not setup BT or buy a few thousand servers a day before? Lol!
Some time ago Firefox set a world record for downloads. I think that if Microsoft wanted this record, then they surely got their millions of downloads not in a day, but in one hour
It’s up now. I got me one each of 32 and 64 bit keys. Now if I can just get the darn thing to install…