Windows 7 is less then a year away from final release (the current date everyone’s talking about is January 2010) and Microsoft has delivered an unexpected gift for users. Says the BBC:

“Anyone buying a PC with Windows 7 pre-installed will be able to swap it for XP or Vista.

Microsoft has confirmed that the licence conditions under which the software will be sold will allow people to downgrade.

The conditions will apply to both businesses that buy licences for Windows in bulk and consumers that get the operating system on a PC or laptop.”

This is certainly due to the blow back of bad press and word of mouth that Vista has received. It’s obvious that Microsoft is trying to improve its image and letting people downgrade to the OS of their choice is an excellent step.

The only potential headache deals with tech support. The BBC article states that anyone who purchases a new computer will be able to do a downgrade. This just increases the workload when it comes to supporting these customers, three versions of Windows to support instead of one.

Sorry about the huge title. :)

I was recently installing the Windows 7 beta on my laptop using VMWare and ran into the following error:

Windows could not collect information for [OSImage] since the specified image file [install.wim] does not exist.

I was watching Fringe (great show) and tried a few reboots of the Virtual environment during the commercial breaks. When I realized that this method would not work I decided to burn the Windows 7 image file onto a disc (I was trying to install directly from the .iso). To be on the safe side I burnt the .iso at 4X speed and made sure that the disc was verified.

And it worked! So if you get this error one possible solution is to burn the .iso onto a disc at a slow speed.

Hope that helps.