Windows 7 Beta

Seems Microsoft has removed the 2.5 million limit on windows 7. Too bad for me. I had just wasted a lot of time rushing to be in that 2.5 million. Can't blame them they screwed that whole thing up so bad. 60% was already comsumed and I bet the REAL number was probably close to 10%. The overwhelming numbers of users wanting to beta test windows 7 was the reason they gave but I think it is a cover-up. First they released the whole thing but not on the page they said they would (at least not yet) but those that were bored (myself for example) quickly found the page the main site was gonna link to later on. I started going through the process of getting my key. It was a quick, simple process involving the use of your live-id login. I was headed to the page I can only assume (at the time) was to give me my key and got "server is too busy". After fruitlessly pressing F5 for 5 minutes I checked lifehacker. Sure enough, someone over at wired had stumbled upon the same thing I had and it in turn got posted on lifehacker. That explained why the server just "died". Another 5 minutes of F5 and now the server was taken offline by Microsoft having caught their mistake.

Later on in the day the official release is made. Once again wired comes through and breaks the download counter of Microsoft's by posting a direct download link. Thereby rendering the 2.5 million download limit worthless. Then there are people like me that wanted many keys. And found ways to get many registration keys. Pressing F5 being the easiest. Yep, pressing F5 will get you a different key. Though you only get 5 unique keys per version. Still one sign up nets you 10 keys in total?

Microsoft was probably forced to remove the limit not so much because of a huge number of beta testers but because if they didn't there would likely be less than 250,000 beta testers not the 2.5 million they planned for.

Published on 2009-01-12 17:32:00.