back to article Bootleggers jump on 'complete' Windows 7

Microsoft has been taking some heat lately for not listening to testers' feedback on Windows 7 as it insists that the operating system is essentially complete. Now it seems pirates and bootleggers in South East Asia are starting to cash-in on Windows 7's status as almost done. Bootleg copies of 32-bit editions of Windows 7 …

COMMENTS

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  1. Aaron

    hmm

    wonder if this is just a beta build or really is the final iso, as for bootleg copies well vista with a certain bios loader works perfect and I use it on my installs even though the pc's come with a liscence to the same software its easier than having to call to activate each time I install (and I install a lot because its testing laptop so I often break stuff or swap os's)

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Problems

    I surely hope they will be listening to some of the feedback information coming back to them about Windows 7 before a full release as I have come across several bugs whilst using it. One of them being in Windows Explorer if you delete a folder via right-click delete from the left navigation pane (whilst in the folder) after deletion the navi pane takes you back up to the parent folder, but doesnt refresh the contents pane, leading you to believe that the parent folder contains the same as the (now deleted) child. [potentially empty, which may make you delete a folder you believe to be empty but which actually contains data. which has occurred to a friend of mine).

  3. Lex
    Alert

    Anyone else

    Sorry I forgot to mention in my above post. Has anyone else encountered any problems? Perhaps if a few of the biggies are listed here the reg can verify then use these examples to try to get in touch with someone in Microsoft who knows what they are doing (although it seems like there is no such person on the Win 7 management team).

  4. Colin Wilson
    Linux

    Sounds like...

    The Asian bootleggers have found the correct price point !

  5. Michael
    Linux

    who cares???

    a snapshot is only as good as a backup.

    how good is the system then?

    Penguins -

    Blut-Blut-Blut!!!!

  6. Kanhef

    Wait, what?

    First you say some people are complaining that there won't be a second public beta. Then you say the first is already so stable some people are ready to deploy it. Am I the only one who sees a contradiction here?

  7. Jeremy
    Pirate

    Activation.

    Until somebody cracks the activation system, of course, which will probably take all of about three seconds, assuming it hasn't been done already.

  8. Ned Ludd

    "anyone getting hold of a bootleg copy is likely in for a disappointment"

    At $1.44 a copy I think the disappointment will be easy to get over.

  9. Jason Hall

    better than XP though?

    "A knock-off copy of Windows 7, therefore, will be a snap shot of the planned operating system that's frozen in time."

    How does that make it any different to the millions (i suspect) of people who are stuck with XP SP2 corporate edition.

    A snapshot of a newer, safer, quicker OS *should* be much better than an older more unsafe OS?

    Would still probably be better than this broken nasty Vista I am forced to use atm.

  10. Alain
    Pirate

    Just as if they cared

    ``A knock-off copy of Windows 7, therefore, will be a snap shot of the planned operating system that's frozen in time''.

    Anyone who's lived in one of those countries will smile at this sentence. The kind of people who buy this bootleg software disks couldn't care less. And they trash/reinstall their operating system at least once every 3 months anyway... It's just for the *fun* of it, buddy.

  11. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    How much does bootleg XP sell for?

    I just wondered: When Microsoft users have a choice, which do they prefer?

  12. Ash

    "Lack the official activation key..."

    Whay, like Windows xp did with Genuine Advantage?

    I hate to be the one to tell you, but Microsoft sent out instructions to disable the notification to volume licenst customers who got stung with false identification of unlicensed keys. I'm willing to bet that they're on the web somewhere.

  13. raving angry loony

    missing words

    The author writes "So stable is the Windows 7 beta that individuals at some partners are beginning to feel confident enough to run this instead of Windows Vista on their PCs.".

    Shouldn't that be "So stable is the Windows 7 beta COMPARED TO VISTA that individuals..."

    Which, really, wouldn't be hard. Vista has really been a cash cow for me. Clients who didn't heed my warnings against Vista have been paying a hell of a lot more than normal to keep their systems running. It's been quite profitable, with all the problems I've had to try to resolve with that piece of trash. That said, I'm converting clients away from Microsoft as fast as possible. I'd rather have less hours per client than the headaches that accompany having to work with that shit.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    What kind of nutball

    would pay a dollar for windows 7 - that's -way over what the software is worth

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Remember...

    An MS beta is a F/OSS alpha. Like most MS OSs, wait for sp1 to come out before thinking about it.

    Me, I'm sticking with XPsp3. It works, it's fast and I don't see why I should slow my PC down with a lot of crap that I don't want/need. When the time comes, the penguin shall rise and it will be "Adios" to MS and their bloated garbage.

  16. Steve Foster

    Isn't this a Plus?

    The lack of updates from MS that may break, change, or otherwise "improve" Windows may be seen by some as an advantage!

  17. Lionel Baden

    oh the joys

    i can already see 1'000s of infected illegal copies now !!!

    Grr

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Oh really?

    "So stable is the Windows 7 beta that individuals at some partners are beginning to feel confident enough to run this instead of Windows Vista on their PCs."

    ...the same people who were confident enough to run Windows Vista on their machines?

    They're probably thinking "This Vista thingy is utter crap. Let's replace it..."

    If they're thinking at all ;)

  19. Paul Crawford Silver badge
    Linux

    Why bother?

    In my case, 70 pesos is too much. I already have w2k and it works well enough, recently I moved to Ubuntu and put my copy of w2k in a VM for any windows-specific stuff. Apart from a slightly 'sticky' response for typing stuff in, it gives me the best of both worlds as if (when?) Windows gets infested, I can just restore the copy of the clean (original) VM. Sorted!

  20. Disco-Legend-Zeke
    Paris Hilton

    Botnet in a Basket

    Luckily this version will be completely free of security holes, so updates will be unnecessary.

    Paris, because its her birthday.

  21. Tuomo
    Go

    But they have listened...

    It seems that at least some feedback has been listened to:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/26/some-changes-since-beta.aspx

  22. Doug Glass
    Go

    Max $1.44 ??? ....

    Dang, I'll take a six pack, resell them for $2.88 and make a killing!

  23. Jonathan Schofield

    Been running the Beta for 2 months

    Apart from the explorer issues (painfully slow and patchy across our domain network) I have no problems at all. In fact I quite like it. Running on a Dell XPS M1330 with 2GB ram

    When I come to the office I twin screen it... works "straight out the box". Shut the lid, go home and connect to VPN..... Only rebooted twice since I got it.

  24. Jacob
    Go

    Windows 7 frozen in time

    Windows 7 frozen in time is better than Vista any day of the week. I've been running the beta for months and haven't looked back (to Vista or XP).

  25. passionate indifference
    Stop

    el reg needs a percentage score at the top of every story about MS software

    to give an idea of the quality of the comments section. A higher percentage means that you'll be spending quite a lot of your lunch hour pgdning through comments from people you tend to avoid at school reunions and office parties.

    Personally quite like Windows 7, although I'd be interested to see how corporate IT guys deal with it when it's in the corporate mainstream. I run Ubuntu in a VMware setup on Windows 7 and it's still doing my web, FTP and ssh stuff whilst I'm playing Fallout 3.

    It's a bit like the article also published recently in El Reg about Apple's latest line of products - it's rather a yin release, which is probably a good thing. Of course, Windows 7, with its history, is going to draw some attention by missing out a beta step, and I think it's justifiable to ponder why MS has gone down this route. No matter how good it looks in beta, it's going to get pulled apart once it hits retail, and questions are going to be asked as to whether the time it decided not to use was well spent?

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