Microsoft Windows 7 Demo Leaked

When we were busy preparing for the new year celebrations, Secret Santa was hard at work in bringing Windows 7 to the world earlier than Microsoft. How it all happened is still a mystery but a “Genuine Image” of Microsoft Windows 7 Beta 1 Build 7000 has been on the Internet since the 26th Dec of last year.

Since then there has been a great buzz and its availability has soared thanks to the BitTorrents sites. I expect this buzz to increase tremendously in the coming few days once the New Year celebrations come to an end. The last time I checked, the DVD image was at the 18th position among the Top 100 downloads on The Pirate Bay, the top most among the Applications category. The image is about 2.44GB in size, for 32-bit systems, and is not fake. The comments on the torrent page shows a healthy interest on Windows 7 after the Windows Vista catastrophe. (I won’t share the links here because we are talking about piracy here.)

However. It is not a full release of the new OS but only a demo version with minimal features. A beta copy of this was given away by Microsoft to several developers in Nov 2008 for them to review it. The beta was expected to be made public by Microsoft in the near future anyway.

While there have been rumors that, naturally, Microsoft may have been behind this leak, it was probably distributed by one of the developers that received the beta.