14 DAY TRIAL // Thousands of Australian students have been able to use the gold release of Windows 7 since early August 2009, almost concomitantly with MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The New South Wales government has been distributing approximately 5000 Lenovo netbooks each week, each preloaded with the RTM Build 7600 development milestone of Windows 7, according to AustralianIT. A few schools in NSW have been testing Windows 7 since the availability of Release Candidate Build 7100 in May 2009, including students at the Arthur Phillip High School.
In the second half of June 2009, Microsoft confirmed that select customers would be receiving Windows 7 RTM well ahead of the official General Availability date set for October 22nd, 2009. At that time, the Redmond company pointed to the Sheraton Hotels & Resorts, which would be among the first companies to roll out Windows 7 PCs.
Still, with the RTM bits of Windows 7 served to Original Equipment Manufacturers immediately after the gold milestone was announced on July 22nd, 2009, Lenovo had sufficient time to prepare the first netbooks for NSW students. Lenovo Australia is the winner of a $150 million contract under which it will provide no less than 267,000 netbooks to both students and teachers of secondary school in NSW. The Australia federal government committed no less than $2 billion for a digital education "revolution" project, which supplied the funding for the Lenovo IdeaPad netbooks pre-installed with Windows 7 RTM.
NSW Department of Education chief information officer Stephen Wilson noted that over 28,000 netbook units would be offered to NSW students over the course of the coming week. “The process of allocating a device to a student is just amazing," Wilson revealed. "[Students] unpack the box, we know the serial numbers, we know the student has got their permission slip from their parent. When they type in their user ID and password, it associates the serial number, MAC (Media Access Control) address, user ID and password all to that user, and verifies it. Every time that user uses that machine we're continually monitoring the fact that it's their computer and they're using it.”