Hi vizzah. These are all Enterprise Evaluation versions of Windows for the most part and they all expire. We recommend you download once, take a snapshot BEFORE first use, then after 90 days revert to the snapshot. Not ideal I know as you still lose any changes you did to the image but saves you downloading again and configuring. Apologies for that bit of pain.
Hi Tmmrn. I work on the team that made these available. We originally had these as >3Gb single files and had many requests to reduce the file sizes from people who had failed transfers. It also helps when using sneaker net to setup test environments that are isolated and you need USB sticks to move bits around.
We went with RAR because:
* It's available on all platforms
* No client or 3rd party software needed to extract when using self extracting SFX and EXEs respectively
* some degree of built in resiliency and self correction
Hope you find them useful. Open to suggestions for improvement too. Follow the team @IEDevChat for updates and feedback.
Open Source, available on all the major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX). You can find also the MSI version that can be deployed via Active Directory GPO
Oh, and you can create self-extracting file too (even though I don't know if you can unpack them on other platforms, never tried, but I should bet you can do it)
It's silly to recommend a program when complaining about a format. But yes it would be better if they used zip, which also happens to be integrated in Windows Explorer.
afaik the plain .zip doesn't support multi-part archives and that's what they needed due to the file size.
by citing 7-zip (site) I was of course suggesting the .7z file format that is opensource and there are softwares and libraries freely available.
Alternatively, this is a perfect use case for a torrent.
It always boggles the mind how the big players seem to be avoiding this download scheme like the plague even though it's unrivalled for these kinds of downloads, especially when there's a rush on the files like you'll no doubt notice in the next 10 days or so.
Most large corporations, but for the freelancers and folks working for small business, a .torrent would be a godsend as an option. Especially if done with something like S3's torrent support, which lets Amazon function as the always-there seeder.
Glad you are here. Thank you so much for doing this. Just wanted to let you know that I found out about this via a twitter sponsored tweet. So whoever decided to do that as a marketing idea probably is getting their money's worth.
Bill. Just wanted to let you know that Microsoft has been auto-updating all users that have opted into MS updates on their Windows machines since January. A majority of XP users should now be on IE8, all other Windows machines should have IE9. http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/microsoft-decides-to-...
Follow @IEDevChat for updates and stuff.