I have been trying to download the betas since they were made available. The downloads consistently fail to complete. You'd think MS would get this right, but no.

If you are trying to download to a drive with fat 32 filesystem you will get this problem every time. Fat 32 cannot support the full size of the download. Try upgrading your drive to ntfs and then try downloading again.

Despite having all drives formatted NTFS, I have had the same difficulty, with the Akamai downloader erroring out almost immediately with this error msg: Download Manager ErrorDownload integrity is invalid. Try to download a fresh copy of the URL. Would you like to start over? Possible solution: I manually retyped the very long URL visible in the downloader, typing directly into the address bar and then did an http download. The downloaded file,7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso, displays in Windows Explorer as 1,351,324 KB. I don't know if my download is good, because no MD5 was posted. Here's the link I typed: http://wb.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULFRE_EN_DVD.iso

I am getting the same thing with server 2008 r2 beta, it only downloads 716 bytes

Have you download Windows 7 beta in Internet explorer? Did you install the download manager on the computer successfully?

That doesn't sound right... The file size should be 2,557,416 KB..

you can try using these direct links.to use a different downloader like download accelertor plus.but will still need the key.http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprogeneral/thread/637be389-ffc5-4c5f-ab92-b88cfc522dd2

A colleague of mine downloaded the 2 betas no problem. He connects via Astound Cable. I connect via Speakeasy dsl. I have Win 7 x32 running in VMWare 6.5. I had trouble with the ethernet driver but otherwise this beast is pretty stable.