Be Prepared: Windows 7 Beta Will End on July 1, 2009
By Jin Nan Goto
If you downloaded the official Windows 7 Beta back in January (build 7000 if you’re keeping track of these things), it’s license expires on July 1st and Windows will start automatically shutting down every two hours. So now is a very good time to move on from the beta to the Release Candidate(build 7100). Unlike the beta the RC will continue to function. You can download the RC until August 15 and it will stay valid until march 2010.
You can download the RC from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx. If you are so inclined you can try and get the latest build of Windows 7. Although these are not released by Microsoft and are really only available from somewhat questionable sources **cough—bittorrent. If you go for these later builds, be sure to check the MD5 checksum of these downloads to makes sure that you are not downloading and installing spyware and other unwanted additions. You can get a free md5 hashing tool from http://www.winmd5.com/.
