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January 9, 2009 3:14 PM

Windows 7 Beta interest overwhelms Microsoft servers; my friend says its worth it

Posted by Benjamin J. Romano

Windows 7 logo illustration by Seattle Times graphics artist Gabriel Campanario.

Was all the attention Microsoft gave to the test version of Windows 7 at CES Wednesday perhaps a bit too much? Public availability of the Windows 7 Beta, originally scheduled for noon today, has been pushed back as interest exceeded the infrastructure Microsoft had put in place to pass out the bits. In fact, even the company's official blog posts on the situation are crawling as of 3:27 p.m. The company is putting more servers online to accommodate the intense demand. And, according to one IT pro friend of mine, it's justified.

He grabbed the Windows 7 Beta a bit, ahem, early, after an epic struggle to install Vista Ultimate on a media PC he was building. Here's his story, as told to me in e-mail on Monday:

So, I went to Fry's this weekend to buy parts to build another computer at home - exclusively for doing video and music to my TV and surround system.

Got it all assembled and proceeded to spend the next 2-3 hours installing Vista Ultimate only to get lots of error messages when I tried to run Vista after installation.

Thinking I had done something wrong, I reinstalled it - another 2-3 hours with much the same results.

Thinking at this point it was some bad hardware or something that wasn't compatible with Vista, I was about to take back the motherboard when I decided to install Windows 7 just for the fun of it. At that point I had nothing to lose right?

30 minutes later, Windows 7 Ultimate was installed and running just fine. MediaCenter was working. The WinTV PVR card I had worked and it even installed the drivers automatically. It even recognized the wireless DiNovo bluetooth keyboard without me having to install the software for it.

I installed iTunes and copied music over and all worked just great!

Vista sucks but I love the new Windows 7 OS!!!!!

By the way, in a chat later in the week, he struggled to remember the last time he felt that way about a Microsoft OS.

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