News: Windows 7 Beta Download Period Extended

Good news!  The Windows 7 Team Blog announced that they’ve yet again extended the period in which you can download the Window 7 Beta.  As you may recall, I blogged about the original extension a couple weeks ago.  And now we’re doing it again.  You now have until Feb 10, 2009 to start the download.  And if you were interrupted mid-download, you have until Feb 12, 2009 to complete it. Product Keys for the beta will also be available through February 12, 2009.

“February 10 is only a couple weeks away!”

Yeah.. time is running out.  Get your bits while you can.

“Does this mean that you haven’t reached the 2.5 million download limit yet?”

I have no idea.  One could imply that.  But it might also be that all the positive press around the beta has driven demand higher.  (Just speculating there.. I don’t know one way or the other.)

“What if I’m a TechNet Subscriber?”

TechNet Plus and MSDN subscribers will still be able to download the beta throughout the length of the beta program.  The February 12th date doesn’t apply to them.  (Not a subscriber?  If you want to be, don’t miss out on this discount.) 

“So.. you’ve said that you might even upgrade your production computer with Windows 7 .   Have you done that yet?”

Yessiree!  Did it yesterday.  Took the plunge.  After having upgraded three home machines plus done fresh installs of several others (both physical and virtual), and after installing it fresh and trying out my most needed applications on my laptop, I decided it was time.  So yesterday I did both a Complete PC Backup as well as a storing of my files and settings using the Windows Easy Transfer Wizard (can’t be too careful), and then I did the upgrade.  So this blog post is coming to you from my upgraded Windows 7 Beta x64 laptop (a Lenovo T61p).

“How’s it working?”

Wonderfully, for the most part.  My smartcard reader driver didn’t work right away.  When I had done the clean test install earlier, it found the device, and the installed driver worked fine.  But after the upgrade the existing driver didn’t want to work right.  Removing the driver and letting Windows 7 find the proper one worked really well, though.. so that issue was easily resolved.  Also, I did have an update to my video driver that became available.  I installed it, but since then I did have the video driver crash on me once.  Amazingly, all that happened was a screen flicker followed by a note telling me that my video driver had crashed and restarted.  If that becomes a regular occurrence, I’ll just roll-back the update. 

Keep watching my blog for more notes on my experience, good or bad. 

Have you tried it yet? What’s not working for you? What’s surprised you (pleasantly or otherwise)?