January 15th, 2009
South African Windows 7 Download Link
Even though I am an Ubuntu user (and fan) I still like to keep Windows on my machine in-case I need to test a website in IE or need to run Windows only software that does not run nicely under wine. I do not dual boot with Ubuntu and Windows, but instead I use VirtualBox which is free open source virtualization software developed by Sun Microsystems that works on all platforms.
Anyway, I started downloading Windows 7 the other day and then suddenly realized the file was 2.4gigs! So I immediately canceled because it would have meant that 1 out of our two Telkom internet accounts would have been capped half way through the download. We easily use over 10gigs a month here at home and if I downloaded Windows 7, we would have never lasted the rest of the month. I actually think it is about time I get a prepaid ADSL account…
Never-the-less, today I was presently surprised when browsing twitter to find a local download link of Windows 7. Thanks to Jason Adriaan’s awesome site called LocalList we can actually download Windows 7 on a capped Telkom account. LocalList also provides a bunch of other cool local sites which you can browse when your internet account has been capped.
Lucky for me, one of our accounts is about to be capped and so I am going to leave the download to run through the night on that account 
I am using the KGet KDE download manager as I don’t trust the FireFox resume feature at all.
You can find the local South African download link to Windows 7 here.
Microsoft and others (ie Apple) use Akamai and other services to distribute and cache content globally. That’s why you can download Microsoft files once you’re capped.
Thanks for mentioning Local List Matt. Richard is correct when he mentions Akamai. It is truly unbelievable the amount of cool content they make available to us using local-only accounts. We try to list tons of it on Local List and will continue to do so in the future. Actually we are currently backed up with links, hope to pump it out soon
Cheers
I thought Windows 7 comes out in Oct, how’d you get it so early?
Hi Jimmy,
A Couple of months ago Microsoft released a beta version of Windows 7 for anyone to try out. The final release of the software will be out in October.
I think, your dell 1.7 Ghz even cannot run windows 7 properly after installation. On the other hand windows 7 released just last month Nov. 09. This is ashtonishing. Pl. reply.