Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 7-the beta version-was made available for download to the general public on Saturday, one day after Redmond servers appeared to had failed at handling the traffic from people who wanted to get the OS, which prompted the company to postpone the code’s launch.

Windows 7 had been previously scheduled to be released in public beta on Friday, but reports circulating on the Internet revealed that during the morning, both the public beta download page and Microsoft.com were intermittently unreachable, since downloaders were preparing to take over the company’s websites.

Consequently, in the afternoon, Microsoft announced it would be delaying the launch in order to be able to add infrastructure so as to provide would-be downloaders with all the necessary factors for a successful acquisition of the operating system.

On Wednesday, Microsoft released beta build 7000 to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, while the exact same code is available to public beta testers.

Initially, the company had stated that it would limit Windows 7 beta to 2.5 million users, but it recently announced it had decided to raise the limit on the downloads for the following two weeks.

The minimum system requirements that Microsoft has recommended for beta testers include a 1GHz processor, 1GB of main memory, 16GB of available disk space and support for DX9 graphics, which translates as less hardware capability needed compared to Windows Vista’s requirements.