The big thing this week is Windows 7 being released on 1/9 sometime in the afternoon. I figured I’d wait till later in the day to download to avoid the rush. I guess even Microsoft underestimated the demand. You couldn’t get to the Microsoft site. Microsoft eventually pulled the software so that they could add more servers. (You would think they would talk to VeriSign or other large content provider and discuss P2P technology offerings.)
So I decided to wait till Saturday. I checked the site throughout the day and at my 3:15pm check, the link was there to start the download. After logging into Live Id and answering a short questionnaire, I got my product key and the opportunity to download.
Lucky me, the download button didn’t work. My Mac’s Firefox was setup to allow all cookies, etc. Nothing. I couldn’t figure it out. So I figure, let me fire up Safari and try with that program. Again, nothing.
On a goof, I RDC’d into a WinXP VM I have running on my Ubuntu server and lo and behold – the download button worked. The button attempts to install an ActiveX control from Akamai. You would think that Microsoft would mention that someplace on the website so that downloaders that aren’t using a Microsoft OS would know what the issues were.
In any event – the download was FAST! I had the entire x64 version downloaded in just under 40 min. Earlier in the day, I had started a bit torrent download as a backup plan and even with 1700 people online, I was still at 1% after 3 hours!! But that was for an unofficial bit torrent on a shady service. If done correctly, P2P could have beaten the 40 min download that I eventually had.
So now off to creating a VM on my Mac to see if I can get Windows 7 installed. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but after my last VM Fusion upgrade to 2.0.1, I totally messed up my main Vista VM to the point where when it boots, all networking on the Mac goes away. It time for a new VM and I’m thinking it’s going to be Windows 7