Microsoft Steve Ballmer promised at CES 2009 the immediate availability of the Windows 7 beta to all technet and MSDN customers and a public beta will follow soon. The public beta program started today and you can download it from the technet site. Updated with direct links.
I have tried several times but getting the message server is too busy messages, if you are lucky you could get the download. It is open to first 2.5 million downloads so if you want to try windows 7 go and download right now if you can.
The beta is available in English (32-bit and 64-bit), German (32-bit and 64-bit), Japanese (32-bit and 64-bit), Arabic (32-bit and 64-bit), and Hindi (32-bit). The download comes as an .ISO file, after downloading burn it to a DVD, you can use IMGburn a free program to burn DVDs. Windows 7 beta supports both clean installs and upgrades from Windows Vista SP1. The beta program will end on August 1, 2009, you can’t use this version after that date.
Here are the Hardware recommendations from Microsoft
- Processor: 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor
- Memory: 1 GB of system memory
- Hard drive: 16 GB of available disk space
- Video card: Support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128MB memory (in order to enable Aero theme)
- Drive: DVD-R/W drive
- Internet connection (to download the Beta and get updates)
Download Windows 7 beta. There are some builds (7000) available from torrent sites but not sure whether they are latest or not, 64bit version is available though which appears to be the latest, named “Technet Tap 7000”. It appears that 7000 build is the same as released today.
Update: Direct Links for downloading Windows 7, 32-bit version, 64-bit version. (Thanks to Neowin)
Cool, now it’s more time for me to finally get the download right. I always seem to get a page load error when I’m redirected to the download page form the MicroSoft website. Crazy!