Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft Software’

First and foremost, Bing just doesn’t quite cut the mustard with the results regarding everything I’m about to go into, so the opportunity to evangelize for Bing will have to wait until another day (but if a Bing expert would like to contact me and show me how to leverage Bing in the same manner to yield quality results, I would love to do this same article with Bing as the catalyst).

Something I have people inquire with me about frequently (friends and family and sometimes even random strangers via email) is if I can find a Windows 7 ISO that they can’t find themselves. There are some applicable scenarios for this outside of pirating, such as if you want to honestly give something a trial run or if you’ve purchased a licensed physical or digital copy but you’ve lost the media (either digital or physical). If you can’t find the product on Microsoft’s web site and you don’t want to go the torrent/P2P/newsgroup/rapidshare/etc. route, you’re in luck. I just so happen to be a Google aficionado (via my 8+ years experience with advanced search queries on-the-fly and because I’m an internet marketer full-time now, which means I am practically married to Google) and though what I’m about to show you is a very basic query, it’s the thought processes and the terminology you will learn to apply to them that you’ll benefit the most from. And, hey, if you aren’t even familiar with using Google in this capacity, then you’ll gain that component from this post as well!

Remember: intitle:index.of

Learn it, love it, eat, sleep and drink it. That little prefix to your Google queries can land you a treasure trove of results — and I don’t just mean for the specific scenario I’m going to delve into in this post. Now, with that said, let’s say I need to find an x64 Professional Edition Windows 7 ISO. I’ve got a key but I don’t have the media, right? There are a number of ways to approach this but I’m giving you the keys to the best method right up-front:

• 1 – intitle:index of

 

• 2 – The name of the Windows 7 ISO as you would get it from Microsoft (think via MSDN or some similar avenue where software is distributed digitally, thus resulting in a file name you can search for). So, for our scenario, we could search Google for something like Windows 7 ISO MSDN to find out what Microsoft’s Windows 7 ISO name scheme is. Using that method, I discovered that Windows 7 Professional x64′s ISO name as it exists on MSDN is en_windows_7_professional_x64_dvd_x15-65805.iso.

 

• 3 – With points 1 and 2 in mind, your search query will look like this (click it to see it in Google): intitle:index.of en_windows_7_professional_x64_dvd_x15-65805.iso

And for quick reference, here is a list of all the Windows 7 ISO names (excluding VLK and OEM versions, and I was going to hyperlink them, but the point of this post is to give you a new tool to leverage, so to make you copy/paste these into a new query is by design):

• Windows 7 ISO Enterprise x64 English: en_windows_7_enterprise_x64_dvd_x15-70749.iso
• Windows 7 ISO Enterprise x86 English: en_windows_7_enterprise_x86_dvd_x15-70745.iso
• Windows 7 ISO Ultimate x64 English: en_windows_7_ultimate_x64_dvd_x15-65922.iso
• Windows 7 ISO Ultimate x86 English: en_windows_7_ultimate_x86_dvd_x15-65921.iso
• Windows 7 ISO Professional x64 English: en_windows_7_professional_x64_dvd_x15-65805.iso
• Windows 7 ISO Professional x86 English: en_windows_7_professional_x86_dvd_x15-65804.iso
• Windows 7 ISO Home Premium x64 English: en_windows_7_home_premium_x64_dvd_x15-65733.iso
• Windows 7 ISO Home Premium x86 English: en_windows_7_home_premium_x86_dvd_x15-65732.iso
• Windows 7 ISO Home Basic x86 English: en_windows_7_home_basic_x86_dvd_x15-65654.iso
• Windows 7 ISO Starter x86 English: en_windows_7_starter_x86_dvd_x15-68956.iso
• Windows 7 ISO Language Pack x64 Multilingual: mu_windows_7_language_pack_x64_dvd_x15-73276.iso
• Windows 7 ISO Language Pack x86 Multilingual: mu_windows_7_language_pack_x86_dvd_x15-73272.iso

Remember: You can use this method for *anything*! Office, XP, Vista, Expression, SQL; you name it, you can apply this method to find it.

Now, while that particular approach works 8 times out of 10, for the 2 times it doesn’t work, you may need to get a bit more creative. Sometimes, all the links will be dead or maybe you won’t land a single result. Sometimes, you may find a link that’s live one day but then dead the next, or you might try a query one day only to find nothing, then try it again tomorrow and see that Google has indexed 3 new pages for your search term! Also some factors to take into consideration are thinking what someone else might name the file or you may need to find out the name of a scene release (if you don’t know what that means, basically, it’s when an internet group gets a hold of something and they release it to the general public — of which, they usually change the file name and release it in some kind of archived format like .zip, .rar, .7z, etc.) and search for the file name of the release to see if someone else downloaded it and stored it on their server.

Be creative and don’t get discouraged if you’re not successful! Have a formula and I guarantee you, you’ll never have to worry about how to get a hold of any Microsoft media ever again (unless you’re looking for the latest leaked build of Windows or if you’re searching for something that’s quite obscure or not truly utilized by the public, such as Microsoft MultiPoint Server or Windows 7 Enterprise, etc.).

I hope you found this post useful! Please feel free to comment and spread the word. =)

-Stephen Chapman

http://msftkitchen.com