At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
All weekend as Windows 7 keys were hard to come by, people
tried accessing Microsoft’s TechNet site to access their unique
activation keys. Originally with a 2.5m download limit, people expected
keys to go fast, but with that limit removed, it appears that the
TechNet issued keys are generic – and I’ve used one to activate Windows
7 beta 1, so I know it works!
Activation keys used to “activate” software programs are meant to be unique, thus ensuring your key is not claimed or used by anyone else.
It was expected that with a download limit of 2.5 million copies of the Windows 7 beta, something that has now been reversed (until January 24), there was unsurprisingly an expectation that there would only be 2.5 million activation keys, too.
Thus a scramble emerged for users to try and secure their keys before all were gone. Sites all over the Internet (including iTWire) were showing users how to get Windows 7 keys from the Microsoft TechNet site using a simple method that required refreshing the page a lot.
However it now appears that there are 10 different keys which can be used to activate any copy of Windows 7 beta 1, be it the 32-bit or 64-bit version, and it appears that, at least for now, these keys can be used as many times as anyone likes.
Reported all over the Internet, these keys are as follows:
Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit keys appear to be completely interchangeable.
I personally used one of these keys to activate a copy of Windows 7 beta 1 on a Dell Mini 9 netbook, and given that these keys must have already been used by many, many people, the reports that they keys are generic and can be used by anyone seem to be true.
If you still haven’t downloaded your copy of the Windows 7 beta, you can now do it from the official Windows 7 site.
Michelle Thomas
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