Thwarting Mininova: Microsoft’s Rage Over Windows 7 Internal Test Builds Leaks

Windows 7 is a great expectation slowly acuminated over the years, and everything seemed quite seamless and smooth. Now with this process approaching the end, Microsoft ceased being cool as they had been along the journey.

Lessons from Windows Vista learnt, Microsoft never let loose of Windows 7 that easily from the very beginning. Unlike the Vista testing days, internal builds leaks almost every day with one official CTP build every month costing lots of resources every now and then…from the start, Microsoft cut off all the unnecessary. Before Windows 7 gets to Beta phase, leaks of internal builds are so few that if Microsoft didn’t disclose some detail on their conference, nobody would know what was truly happening in labs of the Redmond giant.

Because of these, available official testing builds of Window 7 would simply be two, one Beta and one RC…sounds ridiculous, compared with the early days of Windows Vista…but it’s true. If anyone wants to get legitimate latest previews of the Windows 6.1 in development, he has to join TAP, a program from Microsoft provided members immediate previews of Windows 7 and keeps to the progress of the development.

People are curious and some of them are tech savvy, and coincidently, some of these people are or know someone that are in the TAP program…Hence there are quite some builds got leaked to the techies, who are eagerly awaiting for any info about the new operating system, and easily to the public, whose curiosities finally got some recalls.

However, since Microsoft doesn’t provide any CTP builds any more, hence they don’t check whether any internal builds’ quality is mature enough for public spreading. All the preview builds, except for the only official build up till now, Beta, are not guaranteed to be functioning right on users’ machines.

As you can guess why grabbing new builds from official Microsoft file servers is impossible, people share these builds over the vast torrent network. Knowing this, or now knowing this at all, people got crazy about the new builds. They try to get it, then upload it. Other people try to download it, then spread it. Torrents websites  like Mininova.org are most benefited since they provide torrents for new builds once it’s available on Internet.

Even though it’s labeled as preview or pre-release, with symbols of Beta or Pre-RC, people still complain about the faults in these testing builds everywhere, cultivating a little “hatred” for Windows 7, the one OS that Microsoft can’t risk any failure with.

That’s why Microsoft cannot stand silent towards these leaks, especially after the recent leak of build 7106 from mainland China. The Simplified Chinese version testing build is the most latest leak up till now, within which a lot of translation errors and faults persisted even after many people reportedly provided feedbacks to Microsoft engineers at earlier time after discovering them in earlier leak builds. This portrayed a rather poor image for Microsoft, who seemed determined to make Windows 7 an ever best Windows.

Enough is enough. Lessons leant, and errors won’t be repeated, Microsoft took sharp actions to prevent further leaks of immature internal testing builds of the OS under development.

Here are some evidence.

Before yesterday, a search about Windows 7 on mininova.org would return 164 torrents.

And now there are only 94, deleting all those containing leak builds images.

A search on google.com still shows up the already deleted torrents.

But clicking on any link would simply end with this zero result page.

How about google cache?

But opening any link would also result into empty finds.

I’m guessing Microsoft would hold testing builds tight, and the next time some build got leaked, it would be a quite mature one, RC quality ready, and obvious errors free image.

Still, the testing builds are too few…so please make it done early, Microsoft.