[Joel Crane]

I am a student at Boise Bible College, and we are a small enough school that they don't provide .edu addresses. I took a picture of my student ID card on Macro with my camera and submitted it to get Windows 7 Student. It's been a couple of weeks, and I've had no reply. How long does it usually take?

Being a poor, broke, starving college student, I sure don't have the cash to buy a retail copy.

[Joel Crane]

I am a student at Boise Bible College, and we are a small enough school that they don't provide .edu addresses. I took a picture of my student ID card on Macro with my camera and submitted it to get Windows 7 Student. It's been a couple of weeks, and I've had no reply. How long does it usually take?

Being a poor, broke, starving college student, I sure don't have the cash to buy a retail copy.

[Reid Kistler]

Not a clue what the "usual" time period might be - but this early after the official release would expect the system to be all bogged down with requests.

While your school might be small, do they have an IT department?

Unless it is Very Small indeed, would guess that you are not the only student looking to upgrade - try checking with IT to see if they have already dealt with the issue.

Another possibility would be to try to get either IT or the Admin Staff involved in directly contacting MS, on behalf of ALL of the students of the college (that might seek an upgrade) - Official Organizational Inquiries can sometimes open more doors than a single individual can...

Good Luck!

[Joel Crane]

I traded time playing Modern Warfare 2 on my Xbox 360 with the I.T. guy here on campus for a .edu address. I successfully purchased Windows 7 Professional, downloaded it, and compiled it into an .ISO using a walkthrough found online.

After that, I performed a clean install. As soon as it was done formatting the drive and installing, I performed an in-place "upgrade" on the fresh install. After that was done, it successfully activated. The double-install method worked flawlessly for me.