Windows 7

I believe, practically speaking, you just have to have a working university .edu email address. I find it rather unlikely that they will go through all the effort to make sure every person who made a purchase through them is currently taking classes. At least, that's the gamble I'm taking, since I'm done with school but still have my university email address.

Also, for those that would like to get the Professional version, as opposed to the rather crippled "Premium" version, the link for that on their purchase page is unintuitively hidden by a link in a yellow box about connecting to a school network.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I'm running Windows 7 RC2 7100 64-bit on my computer, and so far I haven't had any issues at all. The only problem I really had was the ridiculous install time (~5 hours) which I believe was due to bad RAID interface, and no driver for my 6 year old wireless card (had to install a Vista driver for a different manufacturer's card that used the same chipset).

Also, I allocated 30GB to my install partition, but you could probably get away with 15GB if you are loading only the OS and nothing else onto the partition. EDIT: But yeah, if you tack on cumulative updates and install all your programs to your OS directory as Acer said, then you might want to double or triple that.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Thankfully, after W7 was finally installed, I've experienced no recurrence of a problem like this. (though wmpnetwk.exe can suck big black dicks)
I'm hoping Asus will get their shit together for the proper release. I certainly don't want to go through that shit again.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

DN: I'm not a moron; I know about and use other media players, but there is a strange process that's part of the WMP12 system (wmpnetwk) that somehow takes precedent over most other processes, and stalls the computer for a minute or two at a time. The only way I was able to actually get it to stop shitting all over my hard drives' was to manually delete the fucker. I think it was enabled when I was experimenting WMP12's new streaming system, but it failed to disable that part when I turned the streaming stuff off.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Zergrinch

I have two questions and a request, regarding the student deal of $29.99!

1. The version on offer appears to be Windows 7 Home Premium. I'm currently on XP Professional. Will I miss anything?

2. Will there be ... difficulties (say, with activation and stuff) if I were to ask one of you guys to buy this for me? The promotion site says this is non-transferable, and it says Microsoft may demand full retail price if it discovers you aren't a current student, so...

And the request.

Assuming the answer to both questions are "No", can I rent the use a US-based .EDU e-mail address?

If you have any valid .edu email address, I think you should be good. There was a while where some australian organization was giving out free .edu email addresses, but Digital River caught on and I don't think they're honoring those purchases.

Also, to the first question, Win7 Professional is also available at the same price. Of course being the assholes that they are, they've obscured the link in the purchase page for the Professional version. I think there are a great deal of features that you will miss if you get the Home edition, and while Win7 Pro is still mildly crippled, its not nearly as bad as Home, which would likely be hell for someone like you.
See: Windows 7 editions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I was speaking idiomatically.

Brady, were you burning the 64 bit version from a 32-bit operating system?
That has been known to cause some serious issues.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?