Students Reporting Problems With $29 Windows 7
The upgrade installer isn't playing nice for students.
Are you a student in need of Windows 7? Then you might want to look at DigitalRiver's offer for Windows 7 Home Premium for students.
Valid students can still grab a download upgrade copy of Windows 7 for just $29.99 – a pretty stellar deal if you ask us. All you need is to be part of an eligible college or university. Find out more here.
Unfortunately, some users who have purchased that upgrade are reporting problems when unpacking the files and trying to install on a 32-bit machine. So far there seems to be a mix of both successes and failures, depending on how many hoops the user is willing to jump through to jimmy that upgrade into his or her Vista install.
Engadget received a tip that Microsoft is now offering refunds to those who are having trouble in getting this product to work, but of course those who managed to snag Windows 7 for less than $30 likely won't be giving up so easily.
In any case, Microsoft has a support thread going where the company is trying to sort everyone out.
Did you grab the $29.99 deal? If so, have you been having any problems?
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I got a copy of the $30 home premium; did a custom install but for some reason it didn't seem to work too well. The whole thing runs well on default settings but once you start customising, all hell breaks loose.....
Changing the location of target folder within my profile caused new folders to come out of nowhere, and some disappeared to oblivion. The latest catalyst won't install properly, as was poweriso
Did another clean install in the end; things seem to work better this time round, just hope it stays this way......
I was, like many others, under the impression that we would be downloading an iso - as happened with Windows 7 RC.
As such I attempted to to upgrade 32bit vista to 64bit windows 7. I had to jump though a few (relativly advanced) hoops to create a disk but it was painless in the end.
for like $15 more, you can buy a cd version of windows 7 upgrade. that way you can use the cd to start a fresh install of win 7 directly instead of having to install vista and upgrade. only problem was that it will take 2-3 weeks for ms to ship the cd to me
one other thing, when you download the upgrade from ms, you can only download it in like a 30 day window. so make sure you keep a copy handy incase you get some nasty viruses and need to do a fresh install.
last thing, the win7 upgrade file ends in ".box"... soo as far as some of my friends and i know we cant convert that into an iso file to put onto a cd, which is why im paying $15 more for ms to send me a cd.
I've paid for the Home Premium 64-bit version. Thankfully I ordered the DVD because I've downloaded it twice and both times the download unpacking operation has failed with an "Unspecified error" - not very useful! I'm assuming there's been some kind of download corruption, but a lot of other people have complained of the same thing, sometimes having downloaded it around 8-12 times!
What is more of a problem is that the instructions for creating a bootable ISO of the download (you download an extraction .exe along with two .box files, which extracts the files into a folder) include downloading a program from Microsoft, which you have to put into the Windows System folder. You then have to run command-line commands to create the ISO. Seriously, would it have been so hard to just let you download the ISO in the first place?
Got the 64-bit student offer for W7 Pro to replace 64-bit Vista Home premium. Downloaded file and repackaged into an ISO using this link (http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/10/22/how-to-make-a-dvd-of-that-student-only-windows-7/) and burned DVD. Did a clean install from the DVD and encountered no problems.
I got the Student Upgrade in the UK for £30 from Digital River, I downloaded the 64 bit Pro version. I converted it to an ISO file thanks to a internet search and put it onto a DVD. Also did a clean install from the DVD under Win7 RC and had no problems.
The retail seems a bit heavier, although I think it's more to do with the (not so) clean install, but it is more compatible than the RC version, but still too many updates needed downloading.
Overall though I'm just as happy as I was when I installed the RC version.