Microsoft is offering Windows Vista Enterprise as a free download in combination with the Office 2007 Professional System. While all editions of the Windows Vista operating system can be test driven from anywhere from a month to 120 days, this copy of Vista Enterprise is limited to only 30 days. This coincides with the Initial Grace period of the latest operating system from Microsoft.

The limitation is associated with the whole Vista Enterprise and Office 2007 professional bundle. The marriage of Microsoft's flagship products comes in the church of virtualization. The download Microsoft is providing is in fact nothing more than a pre-configured Virtual Hard disk. The Microsoft Office 2007 Professional VHD is essentially an installation of Windows Vista Enterprise with Office 2007 Professional deployed on top of the platform.

This is not the first time that Microsoft has made the bundle available for download, but the VHD was updated on November 5. "This VHD contains both the 30 day edition of Windows Vista Enterprise Edition and an evaluation of Office 2007 Professional which includes Publisher, Excel, Outlook, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, and Word. See how with these new platforms can simplify how people work together, find information and improve business insight, help protect and manage content, and reduce IT costs and improve security. Test drive today to experience how Windows Vista and Office 2007 work better together", Microsoft informed.

All other SKUs of Windows Vista can have their Initial Grace period prolonged up two 120 days via the slmgr -rearm command. The same is not valid for the Enterprise edition of the operating system, which comes to the table with an entirely different activation mechanism. The various editions of the Office 2007 System are also available as stand-alone downloads as 60 days trial versions.

Microsoft Office 2007 Professional VHD weighs in at a maximum of 2678.9 MB, coming with no less than 12 archives (238.4 MB each with one exception) and is available for download via this link.