During his keynote address at CES tonight, Steve Ballmer made it official. The Windows 7 public beta will be made available for download on Friday, January 9th, 2009.
If you've been leery of downloading the version that's been all over the torrent trackers since last week, get your download manager ready and keep your browser tuned to Microsoft's Windows 7 page for the genuine article. Technet, MSDN, and TechBeta members have already been given access.
I've had my share of problems with the leaked version and am hoping that the official release is either a slightly newer build or at least free of the issues that I've had so far. Internet Eplorer 8 hasn't been working 100%, and Explorer itself has stopped responding repeatedly when I've tried to extract large zip archive or move multiple large files onto my flash drive.
