Microsoft Offering 2.5 million copies of Windows 7 Beta For Free

Microsoft has announced that it offer 2.5 million downloadable copies of Windows 7 beta for free.

The latest operating system from Microsoft leaked online late last year, and has been a popular download on BitTorrent and other P2P downloading services.

The deal does naturally come with a couple of catches. The biggest is that the beta will expire, although generously you’ll get to use it until August 1, 2009. The other catch is that the Beta version being released is the upgrade version, so it can only be installed on top of Vista.

The Windows 7 Beta will be available in English, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Hindi, and each language will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

The download is available from January 9 here. Watch out before hitting the link though: if you’ve not got the latest version of Silverlight installed, it can and does cause browsers to crash.