{"id":276,"date":"2009-01-16T00:01:49","date_gmt":"2009-01-16T08:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=276"},"modified":"2009-01-15T20:58:42","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T04:58:42","slug":"windows-7-beta-trials-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=276","title":{"rendered":"Windows 7 Beta Trials, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beta tests. Typically buggy, incomplete software. People excited to get it, boasting about it. Dedicating good, high-end computer hardware. It’s not something I look forward to, but I did it anyway with Windows 7.
\n
\nGetting the Windows 7 beta involves an endless series of steps, a technical process you must complete before you can do the boasting and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageously incomplete code.<\/p>\n

Your journey starts here<\/a>, where you read a lot of junk and eventually find a link that takes to you to the page where you can download the software.<\/p>\n

But wait!<\/em><\/p>\n

You must have a Windows Live ID to continue. I don’t know why. Anyone remember the old Microsoft Passport? I wrote about it, and not kindly. That’s because I thought the universal password model was exceedingly insecure, not to mention dumb.<\/p>\n

I have long forgotten my old Windows Passport, so sighing deeply, I signed up for a Windows Live ID, which involved my waiting for an e-mail message to reply to, convincing Microsoft that I’m a real person. (And possibly opening the door on more Microsoft spam in the future.)<\/p>\n

Eventually, after getting my Windows Live ID (which I’ve now forgotten), I was able to log in and then get access to the very page where I could download the beta.<\/p>\n

But wait!<\/em><\/p>\n

That big Download Now button has lots of text before it. Part of that text is the Windows 7 Beta Product ID Key, which means you must print the page to keep the key and (eventually) use it to register the product. So, I had to turn on my printer, wait for it to warm up, then print the page so that I could lose it \u2014 I mean, use<\/em> it later.<\/p>\n

Then I clicked the big, happy Download Now button.<\/p>\n

But wait!<\/em><\/p>\n

You can’t just download the beta, you must download an ActiveX control that yields the Download Manager. I can’t figure this one out. In the entire universe, there are no other web sites that have you download a “download manager”; instead, you just download the dang file!. Then you run it. Simple. Microsoft is not about simple.<\/p>\n

After downloading the ActiveX controller, which involved four extra security steps and warnings, I saw the file coming my way. Thanks to a fast Internet connection, the 2.2GB download took under an hour. I was ready to install.<\/p>\n

But wait!<\/em><\/p>\n

The file you download is an ISO image<\/em>. On the Mac, you can mount an ISO image directly or burn it to a DVD. In Windows, you can’t do squat with an ISO image. Instead, you must use special software to burn an ISO to a DVD, which is a required step for the Windows 7 beta installation.<\/p>\n

Being bold, I opened the ISO image and . . . the Roxio CD Creator program opened. Because it was the first time I’ve ever used that program, I had to register it. That was painless, but took time. Eventually, the ISO image was burned to a DVD.<\/p>\n

Finally, at long last, I had my Windows 7 beta installation DVD. Next post, I’ll discuss installing the beta, which is just more “But wait” type of high tech drama.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beta tests. Typically buggy, incomplete software. People excited to get it, boasting about it. Dedicating good, high-end computer hardware. It’s not something I look forward to, but I did it anyway with Windows 7.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}