Windows 7 Student Offer: What It Really Means
Written by John Thompson on October 9, 2009 · Filed under Software
You may have seen my post on the Windows 7 student offer that Microsoft are offering. In case you missed it, Microsoft are allowing students with a valid college or university e-mail address to purchase either Windows 7 Home Premium or Windows 7 Professional for £30. The offer came in to affect on September 30th at 4pm, and I’ve since had time to check out what’s on offer for myself.
After providing Microsoft with your student e-mail address, a link is sent to your e-mail account directing you to a link at Digital River (.com) where you’re presented with a web page allowing you to choose either the Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional version (sorry, no Ultimate edition for £30 I’m afraid..) in 32 or 64 bit.
Rather than get a boxed version of Windows, for £30 you get a digital download of whatever version of the OS you chose with a license / serial number. If you want to have a boxed version of Windows, it costs an additional £9, bringing the total to a very reasonable £39. I for one never thought I’d be able to get any version of Windows for that price, so I was very impressed.
I must stress that this is an UPGRADE version of Windows 7 rather than a full version, but if the installer is the same as Windows Vista, which I’m pretty sure it is, you can choose not to enter your serial until after the installation completes, so you can still do a clean install of the OS. If I hadn’t already grabbed myself a full boxed copy of Windows 7 Home Premium for £44.97 in the early hours of the first day of Windows 7 pre-order bargain price promotion, (yes I stayed awake until 2am to buy a Windows operating system…) I’d definitely go for the offer, and encourage all the students reading this to do so before the offer ends on January 1st 2010.
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The method you describe didn’t work for all versions of Vista (OEM upgrades would sometimes just not play ball), but apparently the “twice” trick that worked in Vista does.
You can install without a product key, re-boot, then bung the upgrade disc back in when Windows is loaded. Choose to “upgrade” from Autorun and then put the product key in the second time round. Works a charm apparently, although I haven’t tested it with the RTM yet. I guess we’ll all find out soon enough.
mmm…Windows 7 Student Offer…..it makes me laugh:)))…another GIFT from microsoft!…a big joke!
This is acually an Academic edition of both Home Premium and the Professional ediiton of windows 7. Just thought that you all should know this as my mate bought it including the disk kit. (-: