San Francisco-- The first beta version of Windows 7 -- Microsoft’s much-anticipated next-generation operating system and substitute for the most troublesome Vista, which was expected to reach retailer shelves in time for the 2009 holiday shopping season, has apparently popped up on peer-to-peer network BitTorrent as an ISO file, making it available for anyone to download.

A quick search run on the Pirate Bay BitTorrent site, for example, produced results for two Windows 7 Build 7000 listings, both of which had been posted Friday.

Since Saturday afternoon, one torrent on Pirate Bay display more than 1,800 “seeders” -- the term for a computer that has a full copy of the torrent file -- and about 8,500 “leechers,” or computers that have downloaded only part of the complete torrent.