Alexander Wolfe: I'm perplexed at all the huffing about the difficulties some people had installing the Windows 7 Beta. If you had patience -- or did the download over the weekend in the dead of night, when Microsoft's servers weren't overloaded -- it wasn't a problem. (I know, I really should get a life.) More interesting is that fact that the beta provides strong hints about Microsoft's release schedule for the operating system.

I scurried to grab the beta over the weekend because Microsoft on Friday was threatening to stop validating installs after the first 2.5 million people. On Saturday, after the company's servers staggered under the download strain, Microsoft lifted that limit and said downloads would be available through January 24. Me, like I noted above, I didn't have any problems replacing my Windows 7 pre-beta build 6800 with the new build 7000 beta.

My only complaint is the beta expires in August. I've seen several posts complaining about this expiration date (to be precise, it's August 1, 2009). Wired writes that: "You will probably be forced to go back to using Vista SP1 on August 1 (or maybe upgrade to Win7 Beta 2."