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It’s probably not too surprising that, even though you can still download the Windows 7 release candidate for free from Microsoft and will be able to do so “at least through July 2009”, with no restrictions upon the number of product keys available, Windows 7 RC is widely distributed on — and frequently downloaded from — pirate sites.
It probably also shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of these pirated Windows 7 RC downloads come pre-compromised. Security researchers at Damballa say the trojanned version first appeared on April 24, and had infected around 27,000 hosts before Damballa managed to locate and gain control of the botnet’s command-and-control server on May 10.
“We continue to see new installs happening at a rate of about 1,600 per day with broad geographic distribution,” Tripp Cox, Damballa’s vice president of engineering, said in a statement. “Since our takedown (of the command and control server), any new installs of this pirated distribution of Windows 7 RC are inaccessible by the botmaster.”
However, the botmaster still controls the existing installations, Damballa said. The infected systems are mainly concentrated in the U.S., with 10 percent, and the Netherlands and Italy, with 7 percent each.
“You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”
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This is further proof of the hypothesis that internet security is so bad because users are so dumb. I would make some kind of snarky comment about the folly of this behavior, but really… at some point it stops being amusing and just becomes either infuriating or depressing, and possibly both.
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Running IT for a company with about 120 users, maybe four of whom are actually reasonably computer-literate, will do that to you.
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Some people's kids.. I dunno...we'd have booted them off our BBS's for uploading nukeable junk to us back in the day..
[..Every so often at work, I make a point of the reason I have more experience than the rest of these guys, is because I got out of the Tier-1 piracy rings back in 1993, after cutting my teeth cracking copy protection for the prior two years......yeah.. I've had one of THOSE days...]
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Should I download Windows 7 RC now from Big Brother Hisself in the assumption that it'll be Magically Better than Windows Vista? If I do so, will Big Brother Hisself require I shell out some cash bucks at some later date for Windows 7?
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...OK, more seriously: You can try it for free without obligating yourself to ever buy it, but the release candidate will expire in July 2010, after which it will only run for a maximum of two hours at a time. You can use a tool like EASEUS Partition Manager (http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/11/29/easeus-partition-manager-30-home-edition-free-download-partitionmagic-alternative/), which is a free download, to non-destructively repartition your disk, then install Windows 7 on the second partition and (with a minimal amount of setup) be able to boot either OS at will; that way, if you don't like it, you can just delete that partition again and be back where you started.
And actually, snark aside, the word from people I know who've tried the release candidate is that Windows 7 is a lot better than Vista. They've apparently made a lot of real-world usability improvements, made it more responsive, improved the interface, and trimmed a fair bit of the fat out.
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I still fondly remember DOS 3.1 - and kick myself for not saving THAT OS to a CD before I "upgraded" to Win 98. Win Millennium was even worse, and when I got XP I said "NO MORE". I'm not changing to another OS until I know I've got a better one. Oh, and I would have already gone to Mandriva Linux, except that I have about 2 Terabytes of data on my computer that I can't find a good program to convert to Linux.
*sigh*
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So far as I know, it only runs on Windows, and I've yet to see a reliable Windows emulator for Linux, let alone anything that would convert them all to something a Linux-based program would read. I have Linux on my laptop, but when I burned some of my favorite wallpapers to a CD, the laptop acted like it couldn't even find the disc.
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Most of what you describe should be perfectly playable on Linux. For the Windows-specific software, you always have the option of WINE, or a Windows instance running in VirtualBox or Bochs.
Honestly, that sounds as though you got a coastered disk, or there's a problem with the laptop's drive — which may be as simple as that it can't reliably read the type of CD blank you used. Not all CDs are created equal, and not all CD drives — particularly older ones — will reliably read all media types.